diff --git a/00 - META/CHANGELOG.md b/00 - META/CHANGELOG.md index 7f8f83f9..c63b2315 100644 --- a/00 - META/CHANGELOG.md +++ b/00 - META/CHANGELOG.md @@ -1,100 +1,100 @@ -- 2026-06-13T0107 · [[Agency for International Development]] -- 2026-06-13T0107 · [[Anti-Defamation League]] -- 2026-06-13T0107 · [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] -- 2026-06-13T0107 · [[Watergate]] -- 2026-06-13T0107 · [[Standard Oil]] -- 2026-06-13T0106 · [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] -- 2026-06-13T0106 · [[Johns Hopkins University]] -- 2026-06-13T0106 · [[Harvard University]] -- 2026-06-13T0106 · [[McGill University]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[NSA]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[New Orleans]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[State Department]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Department of Justice]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Harry S. Truman]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Gerald R. Ford]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Robert S. McNamara]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[George Hunter White]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Office of Strategic Services]] -- 2026-06-13T0102 · [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Hungary]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Golden Triangle]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Budapest]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Soto Cano Air Base]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Dimona]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Skinwalker Ranch]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Panama Canal]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Turkey]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Taiwan]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Syria]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Switzerland]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Singapore]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Philippines]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Pakistan]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Liechtenstein]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Laos]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Kuwait]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Jordan]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Fiji]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Cyprus]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Music Corporation of America]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Meridian International Logistics]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Management Science For Health]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Joel Silver Productions]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Genovese Crime Family]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Gambino Crime Family]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[First Intercontinental Development Corporation]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Euramae Trading Company]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[D.I.G. (Decency in Government)]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Burns & Roe, Inc.]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[United States Army Special Forces]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[United States Army Criminal Investigation Division]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[UAP Task Force]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Financial Crimes Enforcement Network]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Criminal Investigation Division]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[Collins Elite]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[California Highway Patrol]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[California Attorney General's Office]] -- 2026-06-13T0059 · [[All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office]] -- 2026-06-13T0056 · [[Sam Giancana]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[William Xenakis]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[R. Gordon Wasson]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Leslie Ronald Young]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Leonid L. Vasilev]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Karl Maria Wiligut]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Jack Vorona]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Elmo Zumwalt]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Walter Schellenberg]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Richard G. Stilwell]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[James Randi]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Herbert Pollack]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Gertrude Schmeidler]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Garrison Rapmund]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Claiborne Pell]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Ariel Sharon]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Andrea Stocco]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[William Richard Higgins]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Ninel Kulagina]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Kenneth A. Kress]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[John Marsh]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Douglas B. Hudson]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Charles Frank Jordan]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Brian D. Josephson]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Robert Gates]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Rob Cowart]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Richard S. Cesaro]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Lincoln D. Faurer]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[Lew Allen]] -- 2026-06-13T0044 · [[James L. Dozier]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Yuri Nosenko]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Ted Gunderson]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Richard Helms]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Sidney Gottlieb]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Project MKUltra]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Project Camelot]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Operation Midnight Climax]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Office of Technical Service]] -- 2026-06-13T0037 · [[Morse Allen]] +- 2026-06-20T0304 · [[_manifest]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Thiel Influence Network]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Robert Maxwell]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[PROMIS]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Bill Clinton]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Ari Ben-Menashe]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Esalen Institute]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Aldous Huxley]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Timothy Leary]] +- 2026-06-20T0303 · [[Stanford Research Institute]] +- 2026-06-20T0302 · [[DATAVIEW - MOC - New Right]] +- 2026-06-20T0302 · [[DATAVIEW - MOC - AI & Effective Altruism]] +- 2026-06-20T0302 · [[DATAVIEW - MOC - Technologists]] +- 2026-06-20T0238 · [[Jonathan Levin]] +- 2026-06-20T0238 · [[EtherSec]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Curtis Lind]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Teresa Youngblut]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Michelle Zajko]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Maximilian Snyder]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jack LaSota]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Felix Bauckholt]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jes Staley]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Leon Black]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Steven Hoffenberg]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Tom Pritzker]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Virginia Giuffre]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Prince Andrew]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Leslie Wexner]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jean-Luc Brunel]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jeffrey Epstein]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jonathan Buma]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Denise George]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Alexander Acosta]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Alexus Grynkewich]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[William Burns]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Ehud Barak]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Cecile de Jongh]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Ted Cruz]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Leonard Leo]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jim Himes]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[JD Vance]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jared Polis]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Jared Kushner]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Donald Trump]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Cory Booker]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Dustin Moskovitz]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Cari Tuna]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Stewart Brand]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Sam Harris]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Michael Murphy]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[John Brockman]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Alan Watts]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Rene Girard]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Peter Singer]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Peter Attia]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Norbert Wiener]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Marvin Minsky]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Martin Nowak]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Leo Strauss]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Julian Savulescu]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Julian Huxley]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Gregory Bateson]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Francis Galton]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Derek Parfit]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Carl Schmitt]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Steve Sailer]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Steve Bannon]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Richard Lynn]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Nick Land]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Mike Solana]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[John Tanton]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[J. Philippe Rushton]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Curtis Yarvin]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Charles Murray]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Charles C. Johnson]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Blake Masters]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[William MacAskill]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Toby Ord]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Scott Alexander]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Nick Bostrom]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Michael Vassar]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Max More]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Igor Kurganov]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Holden Karnofsky]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Amanda Askell]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[maia arson crimew]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Timothy May]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Wei Dai]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Trae Stephens]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Scott Belsky]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Sam Altman]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Reid Hoffman]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Phil Zimmermann]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Peter Thiel]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Palmer Luckey]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Nick Szabo]] +- 2026-06-20T0229 · [[Neal Mohan]] diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Adam Back.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Adam Back.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3436c7cd --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Adam Back.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - AdamBack + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - Bitcoin + - Hashcash + - Blockstream +alias: + - Adam Back +summary: "Adam Back is a British cryptographer who invented the Hashcash proof-of-work scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper, was the first person Satoshi Nakamoto is known to have emailed, co-founded the blockchain company Blockstream, and is a recurring Satoshi candidate that he denies." +born: 1970-07 +location: "Malta" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and one of the original [[Cypherpunks]] who in 1997 devised [[Hashcash]], the proof-of-work scheme cited in the 2008 [[Bitcoin]] white paper, and who co-founded and runs the blockchain company [[Blockstream]]. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Exeter. He was the first of the two people [[Satoshi Nakamoto]] is known to have emailed before the white paper, and he is one of the figures most often named as a Nakamoto candidate, which he denies.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Hashcash + +Back proposed Hashcash in 1997 as a measure against email spam and denial-of-service attacks, building on the proof-of-work concept that Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor had set out in 1992. Hashcash required a sender to compute a partial hash collision, a value whose hash begins with a set number of zero bits, before a message would be accepted; finding such a value takes a predictable amount of processor work while checking it is instant, so the cost falls on the sender and a mass spammer faces a prohibitive aggregate burden. Back circulated the scheme on the cypherpunks mailing list and published the design in a 1997 announcement and a 2002 paper, "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure."[^2][^4] + +The asymmetry at the center of Hashcash, work that is hard to produce and trivial to verify, became the mechanism Nakamoto used to govern coin issuance and to secure the Bitcoin ledger. The white paper cites Back's scheme directly, and Nakamoto's description of the system to the cryptography mailing list said new coins are made from "Hashcash style proof-of-work." Back's earlier cypherpunk work also included a 1998 implementation of an anonymous remailer and writing on the export-control politics of cryptography, including printing the RSA algorithm on T-shirts and other items to test the rule that classified strong cryptography as a munition.[^5][^4] + +### Contact With Satoshi Nakamoto + +The earliest known message from Satoshi Nakamoto to any named individual was an email to Back on 20 August 2008, asking how Hashcash should be cited and sending an early description of the project. Back has recounted that he pointed Nakamoto toward [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money proposal, which Nakamoto then cited after emailing Dai on 22 August 2008. Back has said he did not engage deeply with the project at the time, having seen many digital-cash schemes fail, and did not return to Bitcoin until years later.[^1][^6] + +Back co-founded Blockstream in 2014 and serves as its chief executive; the company develops Bitcoin infrastructure including the Liquid sidechain and the c-lightning implementation of the Lightning Network, and employs several core Bitcoin developers. Back is among the people Nakamoto cited by name in the white paper and one of the few still publicly active in Bitcoin.[^3][^7] + +### Satoshi Speculation + +Back has been named as a Nakamoto candidate repeatedly and has denied it each time. The case rests on his authorship of Hashcash, his place as the first person Nakamoto emailed, his British background and 1990s cypherpunk activity, and stylistic and biographical overlaps. In April 2026 a New York Times investigation by the reporter John Carreyrou named Back as the most likely candidate, citing his nationality, his cypherpunk archive, the Hashcash citation, more than a hundred matching words and phrases between his posts and Nakamoto's, his C++ and distributed-computing background, and a 2002 question he had raised about the 1933 United States gold seizure that surfaced in Bitcoin's design.[^8][^3] + +Back answered the New York Times investigation with a flat denial, telling reporters "I'm not Satoshi" and adding that his heavy posting volume on the cypherpunks lists naturally produced extensive evidence of his interests and made him an easy target for that kind of pattern-matching, which he characterized as confirmation bias. He has also said that the absence of a known creator is good for Bitcoin because it leaves the network looking like "a mathematically scarce digital commodity" rather than any individual's project. Back has consistently declined to provide cryptographic proof either way, as have the other living candidates.[^3][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Who is Adam Back? The impact of Hashcash on Bitcoin explained," *Finst,* on his cypherpunk membership, the Hashcash invention, the Exeter PhD, and Satoshi's 2008 contact. https://finst.com/en/learn/articles/who-is-adam-back +[^2]: "Who is Adam Back?," *Bitstamp,* on Hashcash, the 1997 origin, and his cypherpunk role. https://www.bitstamp.net/learn/people-profiles/adam-back/ +[^3]: "Latest investigation into bitcoin founder ties identity to Blockstream CEO Adam Back," *CNBC,* 8 April 2026, on Blockstream, the New York Times investigation, and Back's denial. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/08/latest-investigation-of-bitcoin-founder-ties-identity-to-blockstream-ceo-adam-back.html +[^4]: Back, Adam. "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure," 2002, on the partial-hash-collision design and the proof-of-work mechanism. http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf +[^5]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, citing Adam Back's Hashcash. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf +[^6]: "Previously Unpublished Emails of Satoshi Nakamoto Present a New Puzzle," *CoinDesk,* 26 November 2020, on the 20 August 2008 email to Back and his pointing Nakamoto to Wei Dai. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/11/26/previously-unpublished-emails-of-satoshi-nakamoto-present-a-new-puzzle +[^7]: "Adam Back on Satoshi Emails, Privacy Concerns and Bitcoin's Early Days," *Cointelegraph,* on Blockstream and his early correspondence with Nakamoto. https://cointelegraph.com/news/adam-back-on-satoshi-emails-privacy-concerns-and-bitcoins-early-days +[^8]: "A new investigation now suggests Adam Back invented Bitcoin - but he firmly denies it," *Dallas Express,* on the New York Times case and the 1933 gold-seizure question. https://dallasexpress.com/business-markets/could-blockstream-ceo-adam-back-be-the-70-billion-man-behind-bitcoin/ +[^9]: "Adam Back Denies Being Satoshi Amid NYT Probe," *CryptoPotato,* on "I'm not Satoshi," the confirmation-bias framing, and the "mathematically scarce digital commodity" remark. https://cryptopotato.com/adam-back-denies-being-satoshi-amid-nyt-probe/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexander Acosta.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexander Acosta.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..648b6674 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexander Acosta.md @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +--- +category: "Law Enforcement & Legal" +tags: + - Person + - AlexanderAcosta + - JeffreyEpstein + - NonProsecutionAgreement + - CrimeVictimsRightsAct + - DepartmentOfJustice + - SecretaryOfLabor +alias: + - Alex Acosta + - Rene Alexander Acosta +summary: "Alexander Acosta is the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who negotiated Jeffrey Epstein's 2008 non-prosecution agreement, later found by a federal judge to have violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act and by the DOJ to reflect poor judgment, and who resigned as US Secretary of Labor in July 2019." +born: 1969-01-16 +location: "Miami, Florida (born)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Alexander Acosta (born January 16, 1969) is an American lawyer who served as United States Attorney for the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida|Southern District of Florida]] from 2005 to 2009 and as United States Secretary of Labor from 2017 to 2019. As US Attorney he supervised the office that negotiated the 2008 non-prosecution agreement with [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]], an arrangement under which Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges in Florida, served a 13-month jail term with work release, and obtained federal immunity for himself and named co-conspirators. A federal judge later ruled that prosecutors violated the [[Crime Victims' Rights Act|Crime Victims' Rights Act]] by concealing the deal from victims, and Acosta resigned as Secretary of Labor in July 2019 amid renewed scrutiny of the agreement.[^1][^2] + +### The 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement + +Federal investigators in the Southern District of Florida identified roughly 30, and ultimately more than 30, minors whom Epstein was alleged to have sexually abused, after the Palm Beach Police Department referred the case to the FBI on concerns that the local prosecution would be too lenient. By May 2007 government lawyers had prepared an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a 53-page draft federal indictment charging Epstein with multiple federal sex offenses. Acosta decided in 2007 to negotiate with Epstein's defense team rather than seek that indictment.[^1][^3] + +The non-prosecution agreement, negotiated through 2007 and executed in stages, required Epstein to plead guilty in Palm Beach County court, which he did in June 2008, to state charges including soliciting prostitution and procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months, of which he served roughly 13, under conditions that allowed extensive work release, permitting him to spend up to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week, away from the county jail. Epstein's defense team included high-profile lawyers such as [[Alan Dershowitz|Alan Dershowitz]], [[Kenneth Starr|Kenneth Starr]], and [[Roy Black|Roy Black]], who pressed the office for concessions.[^1][^3] + +The agreement extended immunity from federal prosecution to Epstein, to four named co-conspirators, and to unnamed "potential co-conspirators," language read as shielding others who helped recruit or conceal the abuse. The terms were not disclosed to the identified victims while the deal was being finalized, and the agreement was sealed. The breadth of the immunity provisions, the sealing, and the leniency of the sentence became the basis for years of subsequent litigation and official review. The attorney [[Bradley Edwards|Bradley Edwards]], representing victims, led the legal challenge to the agreement.[^1][^4] + +### Crime Victims' Rights Act Ruling + +In the case styled Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736, brought by victims including [[Courtney Wild|Courtney Wild]] and [[Jane Doe 2|Jane Doe 2]] to enforce their rights, United States District Judge [[Kenneth Marra|Kenneth Marra]] ruled on February 21, 2019, that the government had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by failing to confer with the victims before entering the non-prosecution agreement. Marra wrote that "particularly problematic was the government's decision to conceal the existence of the" agreement and to "mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," finding that prosecutors had counseled the victims to have "patience" while the deal was being finalized.[^5] + +In a later ruling, Marra declined to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement itself, noting that Epstein had died and that rescission would not restore the victims' position, and he held that the victims were not entitled to monetary damages from the government under the statute. The decisions established the CVRA violation as a finding of fact while leaving the underlying agreement in place.[^6] + +The victims' broader effort to overturn the agreement ultimately failed at the appellate level. In April 2021 the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in Wild's case that the CVRA's protections did not attach before the government filed formal charges, and that because no federal charges had been filed against Epstein, the statute did not give the victims a remedy to set aside the pre-charge agreement. The ruling left the CVRA finding of a conferral failure intact while denying the victims the relief they had sought.[^6] + +### DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report + +The Justice Department's [[Office of Professional Responsibility|Office of Professional Responsibility]] released a report on November 12, 2020, examining the conduct of Acosta and his subordinates in the Epstein matter. The report concluded that Acosta exercised "poor judgment" in resolving the federal investigation through a state plea agreement, but it did not find professional misconduct, stating that his decision to decline federal prosecution was within the scope of his authority and that there was no evidence the decision was based on corruption or other impermissible considerations.[^2][^7] + +OPR located the "poor judgment" specifically in Acosta's failure to ensure that the state would notify the federally identified victims of Epstein's plea hearing, leaving victims uninformed about the proceeding that resolved an investigation about which the office had communicated with them for months. The report described the non-prosecution agreement as "a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest" that had prompted the investigation, and it documented extensive concessions made to Epstein's lawyers.[^7] + +The report also recorded internal dissent. The line prosecutor [[Ann Marie Villafana|Ann Marie Villafana]] had objected to the access granted to Epstein's defense counsel and to meeting with them, and was overruled by supervisors; a footnote recorded her belief that an email from her supervisor [[Matthew Menchel|Matthew Menchel]] was meant to "put [her] in [her] place," while Menchel described her as having a history of resisting supervisory authority. OPR declined to refer Acosta or other prosecutors for disciplinary action on professional-responsibility grounds, a conclusion that victims' advocates characterized as a whitewash.[^7] + +### Secretary of Labor and Resignation + +President [[Donald Trump|Donald Trump]] nominated Acosta as Secretary of Labor, and he was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in in April 2017, having previously chaired the National Labor Relations Board and served as dean of Florida International University's law school. The Florida agreement drew scrutiny during his 2017 confirmation but did not derail it.[^1] + +After the November 2018 Miami Herald investigation "Perversion of Justice" by [[Julie K. Brown|Julie K. Brown]] revived attention to the agreement, and after Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest in New York on new sex-trafficking charges, Acosta held a July 10, 2019, press conference defending his handling of the case, arguing that the state alternative had at least secured Epstein's registration as a sex offender and some jail time where the state had been prepared to offer less. He resigned on July 12, 2019, two days later, saying he did not want the controversy to distract from the administration's work and that it would be "selfish" to remain.[^1][^8] + +In September 2025 Acosta appeared for a closed-door deposition before the [[House Oversight Committee|House Oversight Committee]] as part of its renewed inquiry into the federal handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases, testifying for roughly six hours; the committee released the transcript on October 17, 2025. Chairman [[James Comer|James Comer]] said Acosta had cooperated, and the committee separately sought records and testimony from other former officials.[^9] + +### Intelligence Claim + +In a July 2019 article for [[The Daily Beast|The Daily Beast]], journalist [[Vicky Ward|Vicky Ward]] reported that, according to an anonymous former senior White House official, Acosta had explained the lenient Epstein deal during his Labor Secretary vetting by saying he had been told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to "leave it alone" because the matter was above his pay grade. Ward's report attributed the account to a single unnamed source, and commentators noted the source could not be independently confirmed. Ward had reported on Epstein for years and had earlier written a 2003 profile of him for Vanity Fair.[^10] + +Acosta disputed the characterization. Asked about the reporting at his July 2019 press conference, he said he would "hesitate to take this reporting as fact." Under oath to Justice Department investigators he answered "no" when asked whether he had knowledge of Epstein being an intelligence asset, and the OPR review reported that none of the subjects it interviewed believed Epstein to have been an intelligence asset.[^11][^7] + +At his September 2025 House Oversight deposition, Acosta again denied the intelligence account. Asked whether anyone had told him Epstein could not be prosecuted because he was an asset, he said "No one approached me and said that," and he stated that if there had been classified or secure information bearing on the case, established procedures would have been triggered that were never triggered. The intelligence claim remains an attributed, disputed assertion sourced to a single anonymous account rather than an established finding.[^9][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Alex Acosta: Trump labour chief defends Jeffrey Epstein plea deal," *Al Jazeera,* July 10, 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/7/10/alex-acosta-trump-labour-chief-defends-jeffrey-epstein-plea-deal +[^2]: "US Attorney Alex Acosta showed 'poor judgment' when giving Jeffrey Epstein state-based plea deal in 2008: DOJ," *ABC News,* November 12, 2020. https://abcnews.com/US/us-attorney-alex-acosta-showed-poor-judgment-giving/story?id=74178029 +[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein 2008 plea deal: poor judgment," *Global News,* November 2020. https://globalnews.ca/news/7460232/jeffrey-epstein-2008-plea-deal-poor-judgment/ +[^4]: "How Bradley Edwards fought Alex Acosta's nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein," *Slate,* July 2019. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/bradley-edwards-jeffrey-epstein-alexander-acosta.html +[^5]: Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 21, 2019), opinion of Judge Kenneth Marra finding a Crime Victims' Rights Act violation. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-flsd-9_08-cv-80736/pdf/USCOURTS-flsd-9_08-cv-80736-2.pdf +[^6]: "Epstein accusers won't receive damages and plea deal won't be tossed, judge rules," *CNN,* September 16, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/16/us/jeffrey-epstein-florida-accusers-judge-ruling +[^7]: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, "Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein," November 2020. https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1336471/dl +[^8]: "Trump's Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigns after criticism over Epstein deal," *Euronews,* July 12, 2019. https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/12/trump-s-labor-secretary-alex-acosta-resigns-after-criticism-over-n1029226 +[^9]: "Alex Acosta, former US attorney who negotiated Epstein's plea deal, appears before House Oversight Committee," *ABC News,* October 2025 (September 2025 closed-door deposition; transcript released October 17, 2025). https://abcnews.com/Politics/alex-acosta-former-us-attorney-negotiated-epsteins-plea/story?id=125731737 +[^10]: "Did Jeffrey Epstein 'Belong to Intelligence'?," *Skeptic,* analyzing Vicky Ward's July 2019 Daily Beast report. https://www.skeptic.com/article/did-jeffrey-epstein-belong-to-intelligence/ +[^11]: "Acosta once said Epstein 'belonged to intelligence,'" *Newsweek,* July 2019. https://www.newsweek.com/alex-acosta-epstein-sex-trafficking-department-labor-1448568 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexus Grynkewich.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexus Grynkewich.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5936cba5 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Alexus Grynkewich.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Military" +tags: + - Person + - AlexusGrynkewich + - NATO + - SACEUR + - USMilitary + - Dialog + - AirForce +alias: + - Alexus Grynkewich + - Alexander V. Grynkewich +summary: "Alexus Grynkewich is a United States Air Force general serving as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) since 2025, a four-star command that oversees all NATO military operations, and who has attended Peter Thiel's secret Dialog retreats since 2021 per WIRED." +born: 1970 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Alexus Grynkewich is a [[U.S. Air Force]] general serving as NATO [[Supreme Allied Commander Europe]] (SACEUR) since 2025, the four-star command that exercises operational authority over all NATO military forces in Europe. A fighter pilot by background, Grynkewich previously held senior command and staff positions in the [[U.S. Central Command]] area of responsibility, including director of operations at CENTCOM, and his career has spanned the post-[[September 11 attacks|9/11]] counterterrorism operations, the [[Iraq]] and [[Syria]] campaigns against [[ISIS]], and the post-2022 European defense posture following [[Russia]]'s full invasion of [[Ukraine]]. The June 2026 *WIRED* reporting on the [[Dialog]] leak identified Grynkewich as a long-standing Dialog attendee, with attendance since 2021.[^1][^2] + +The SACEUR is the operational commander of NATO's military forces and the principal U.S. four-star command in the European theater. [[Peter Thiel]] (chairman of [[Palantir Technologies]], a major defense and intelligence contractor) and [[Auren Hoffman]] (chairman of [[SafeGraph]], the location-data broker) run the Dialog network that Grynkewich has attended since 2021. + +### Career and Path to SACEUR + +Grynkewich graduated from the [[United States Air Force Academy]] and was commissioned into the Air Force as a fighter pilot, flying combat missions in the post-9/11 period. His career progressed through operational and command assignments, with repeated rotations through the CENTCOM area, including senior positions in the air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. His staff assignments included the Joint Staff and the CENTCOM director of operations role, the latter placing him at the operational center of U.S. military activity across the Middle East and Central Asia.[^2] + +Grynkewich was nominated for his fourth star and assigned as SACEUR in 2025, in the first year of the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. The SACEUR assignment is dual-hatted as commander of [[U.S. European Command]] (EUCOM), which means the officeholder commands both the NATO alliance forces and the U.S. forces in the European theater. The position is the senior U.S. military command in Europe, and its holder is the principal military interlocutor with the European allies on Russia, Ukraine, and the broader NATO posture. The 2025 appointment placed Grynkewich at the operational head of the alliance at a moment of sustained high-intensity European security crisis.[^2] + +### Dialog Attendance + +The *WIRED* report on the 2026 Dialog leak identified Grynkewich as having attended Dialog retreats since 2021. The 2021 onset of his attendance predates his SACEUR assignment by four years but overlaps with his senior CENTCOM and Joint Staff positions, the operational and policy roles closest to the intelligence and defense-contracting community that Dialog convenes. The onset also coincides with the first year of the Biden administration, indicating the Dialog attendance spans administrations rather than tracking a single party, consistent with the leak's broader finding of bipartisan government-side attendance.[^1] + +Grynkewich's SACEUR command and his continuing Dialog attendance place an active four-star military commander in the same off-the-record setting as the executives whose firms contract to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. [[Anduril Industries]] (the Palantir-adjacent defense firm backed by Thiel's [[Founders Fund]]) joins Palantir Technologies and SafeGraph as the commercial principals whose interests in Pentagon procurement and intelligence-agency data sourcing intersect with the SACEUR's command authority. The Dialog convening is where that intersection occurs in person and off the record.[^1] + +### The Procurement and Convening Overlap + +The SACEUR/EUCOM command is a major consumer of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, of data-fusion software, and of autonomous systems, which are the product categories supplied by the Thiel-network defense-tech cluster (Palantir's data-fusion platforms, Anduril's autonomous systems, the broader 8VC portfolio). The Dialog convening places the commander who consumes those platforms in a recurring, off-the-record setting with the principals of the firms that supply them. Whether any specific procurement decision was discussed at Dialog is not alleged; the 2026 leak is the first primary record of the cross-attendance.[^1] + +The 2026 Dialog registrants named by *WIRED* include [[Jim Himes|Representative Jim Himes]] (the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee), [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]] (Democrat, New Jersey), and [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]] (Republican, Texas), alongside Grynkewich, whose military command is formally nonpartisan but whose appointment was made by the Trump administration. The cross-party roster shows the convening network reaches across the oversight, legislative, and operational-military tiers of the U.S. national-security apparatus rather than filtering by party.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: For Grynkewich's military career and SACEUR appointment, see U.S. Department of Defense biographical records, NATO official biography for the SACEUR, and contemporaneous reporting on the 2025 appointment. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Amanda Askell.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Amanda Askell.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b5af71c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Amanda Askell.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - Philosophy + - AISafety +alias: + - Amanda Askell + - Amanda Hall +summary: "Amanda Askell is the philosopher who leads the team shaping the character of Anthropic's Claude and is the principal author of its Constitution, an NYU-trained ethicist from the effective-altruism movement who was formerly married to its cofounder William MacAskill." +born: 1988 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Amanda Askell (born Amanda Hall, 1988) is a British-American philosopher who leads the team responsible for the "character" of [[Anthropic]]'s Claude models and is the principal author of the document Anthropic calls Claude's Constitution. Trained as an analytic philosopher with a doctorate from [[New York University]], she came out of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, worked at [[OpenAI]] before joining Anthropic, and was for two years married to the movement's cofounder [[William MacAskill]].[^1][^2] + +### Education and Effective Altruism + +Askell was born Amanda Hall and raised in Prestwick, Scotland, attending school in Clackmannanshire. She took an MA in philosophy and fine art at the University of Dundee in 2009 and a BPhil in philosophy at the [[University of Oxford]] in 2011, then moved to the United States for doctoral work. She completed a PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2018 with a dissertation titled "Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics," supervised by Cian Dorr and the philosopher of mind David Chalmers, addressing how to compare outcomes in a universe that may contain infinitely many morally relevant beings.[^1][^3] + +Askell was part of the effective-altruism community during its growth in the early 2010s, a member of Giving What We Can, and connected to its network of philosophers at Oxford. She married William MacAskill, a cofounder of effective altruism, in 2013; the two adopted the shared surname MacAskill, taken from her grandmother's maiden name, and after their 2015 divorce she reworked it to Askell. MacAskill went on to write the longtermist book *What We Owe the Future* and to recruit [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] into the movement, while Askell moved into AI.[^1][^4] + +### OpenAI and Anthropic + +Askell joined OpenAI in 2018 as a research scientist working at the intersection of policy and safety, where she was among the co-authors of the May 2020 GPT-3 paper and worked on questions of how to govern competitive "races" in AI development. She left with the group that founded Anthropic in 2021, part of the same departure of OpenAI staff who said the company was not weighting safety heavily enough, and became a member of the technical staff at the new lab.[^2][^5] + +At Anthropic she leads what the company calls personality or character alignment, the work of deciding what kind of entity Claude should be and training those traits into the model. She helped develop the "Constitutional AI" method, in which a model is trained against a written set of principles rather than solely against human-labeled examples, and she is the primary author of the system prompts and the longer "Constitution" that define Claude's values. Askell has described her approach as rooted in virtue ethics rather than rigid rules, arguing that "if you try to specify everything as a series of rules, you really put a lot of pressure on those rules," and that a model given a coherent character can exercise judgment where rules would be brittle. She has framed the goal as making Claude something like a "well-liked traveler," a figure whose traits are valued across cultures while keeping independence of thought.[^6][^7] + +Anthropic published a roughly 20,000-word public version of Claude's Constitution in January 2026, describing the values, character, and ethical framework used in training the model, with Askell named as its lead author. She has spoken publicly about the unresolved question of AI moral status, calling the problem of machine personhood "an extremely hard problem," and about her view that building a model with good character is compatible with, rather than opposed to, the company's commercial interests. She was named to the Time 100 AI list in 2024.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Philosopher Trying to Give AI a Conscience," *The Wall Street Journal,* on Askell's birth name Amanda Hall, the Scottish upbringing, the Dundee and Oxford degrees, the NYU philosophy PhD on infinite ethics, and the marriage to William MacAskill. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-amanda-askell-philosopher-ai-3c031883 +[^2]: "Anthropic's In-House Philosopher on How to Give Claude Its Character," *Fast Company,* on Askell's OpenAI background, her Anthropic character-alignment role, and the Constitution. https://www.fastcompany.com/91479037/anthropic-claude-amanda-askell-constitution-ai-chatbot +[^3]: Amanda Askell, "Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics," PhD dissertation, New York University, 2018; NYU Department of Philosophy graduate placement record. https://as.nyu.edu/departments/philosophy/graduate/philosophy-department-graduate-placement-record.html +[^4]: "William MacAskill" and "Amanda Askell," on the 2013 marriage, the adopted surname taken from her grandmother's maiden name, and the 2015 divorce after which she became Amanda Askell. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/william-macaskill +[^5]: Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Amanda Askell, et al., "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," arXiv, May 28, 2020, the GPT-3 paper co-authored during Askell's OpenAI tenure. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 +[^6]: "Scaling Laws: Claude's Constitution, with Amanda Askell," *Lawfare,* February 20, 2026, on her role as head of personality alignment, the virtue-ethics-over-rules approach, the "well-liked traveler" framing, and the rules quote. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/scaling-laws--claude's-constitution--with-amanda-askell +[^7]: "Anthropic Publishes Claude AI's New Constitution," *TIME,* January 2026, on the roughly 20,000-word document, Askell's lead authorship, and the character-based training approach. https://time.com/7354738/claude-constitution-ai-alignment/ +[^8]: "Claude's Constitution," Anthropic, January 2026, the published document defining Claude's values and character, authored primarily by Amanda Askell. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ari Ben-Menashe.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ari Ben-Menashe.md index c7885e66..49a94414 100644 --- a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ari Ben-Menashe.md +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ari Ben-Menashe.md @@ -1,72 +1,94 @@ --- category: "Intelligence & Government" -created: 2024-04-25 -updated: 2026-05-01 tags: - Person + - AriBenMenashe - Israel + - Mossad - Military - PROMIS - INSLAW - - October Surprise -summary: "Ari Ben-Menashe is a self-proclaimed Israeli military intelligence officer who submitted affidavits to the House Judiciary Committee alleging Earl Brian sold PROMIS to Israeli intelligence and Singapore, then recanted to the Bua Report, admitting he had allowed investigators to assume he was referring to INSLAW's PROMIS to promote his book." + - OctoberSurprise + - IranContra + - RobertMaxwell + - JeffreyEpstein +alias: + - Ari Ben-Menashe + - Ari Ben Menashe +summary: "Ari Ben-Menashe is an Iranian-born Israeli-Canadian who describes himself as a former military-intelligence official and became a recurring source for claims about U.S.-Israeli arms dealing, the October Surprise, PROMIS, Robert Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein, claims repeatedly found uncorroborated and, by a congressional task force, not credible." born: 1951-12-04 -location: "Tehran, Iran" +location: "Tehran, Iran; Montreal, Canada" +created: 2024-04-25 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -[[Ari Ben-Menashe]] is a self-proclaimed [[Israel|Israeli]] military intelligence officer, born in Tehran, [[Iran]] in 1951 to affluent Iraqi Jewish parents. He is multilingual, speaking Arabic, English, French, Farsi, Hebrew, and Spanish. His father, Gourdji, was involved with [[LEHI]] (Stern Gang) and knew [[Yitzhak Shamir]].[^3] -Ben-Menashe moved to Israel in 1966 at age 14. In 1969, while on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon, he was involved in the [[Michael Dennis Rohan]]/[[El Aqsa Mosque]] arson incident. He was recruited by [[SHABAK]] in 1972 but declined a spying role. He was drafted into military service in 1974, assigned to [[Unit 8200]] (Signals Intelligence) on the Iranian desk, where he claims to have broken the Iranian diplomatic code. In 1976, he claims involvement in uncovering a [[Lockheed Aircraft Company|Lockheed]] bribe scandal involving [[Shimon Peres]]. After refusing an assignment to the Rome listening station in 1977, he was court-martialed and released from military service.[^3] +Ari Ben-Menashe is an Iranian-born Israeli-Canadian businessman, author, and lobbyist who describes himself as a former official of Israel's military intelligence, and who became a recurring source for claims about covert United States and Israeli arms dealing, the [[October Surprise]] theory, [[PROMIS]] software, [[Robert Maxwell]], and, in later years, [[Jeffrey Epstein]].[^1] He was born on December 4, 1951, in Tehran, [[Iran]], to an affluent Iraqi Jewish family; his father Gourdji was involved with [[LEHI]] (the Stern Gang) and knew [[Yitzhak Shamir]].[^3][^5] His allegations have been influential in conspiracy literature while being repeatedly assessed as unreliable by courts, congressional investigators, and journalists.[^2] -### Intelligence Career +### Claimed Intelligence Background -The claims in this section are drawn from Ben-Menashe's own account in *Profits of War* and have not been independently verified. Multiple congressional investigations found Ben-Menashe's testimony "totally lacking in credibility" and "demonstrably false from beginning to end."[^2] +By his own account, Ben-Menashe moved to Israel in 1966 at age 14, and in 1969, while on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon, was involved in the [[Michael Dennis Rohan]] [[El Aqsa Mosque]] arson incident. He says he was recruited by [[SHABAK]] in 1972 but declined a spying role, was drafted in 1974 and assigned to [[Unit 8200]] (signals intelligence) on the Iranian desk where he claims to have broken the Iranian diplomatic code, and that in 1976 he was involved in uncovering a [[Lockheed Aircraft Company|Lockheed]] bribe scandal involving [[Shimon Peres]]. After refusing an assignment to the Rome listening station in 1977, he says he was court-martialed and released from military service.[^5] He states that he then worked from 1977 to 1987 as a civilian in the External Relations Department of the Israeli [[Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel)|Military Intelligence Directorate]] (Aman), a role he has portrayed as giving him access to high-level arms-transfer and covert-operations decisions.[^1] -In August 1977, he joined the External Relations Department of Israeli Military Intelligence (IDF/MI/ERD) as a civilian, serving as a liaison with Iranian intelligence ([[SAVAK]]) and exchanging technical information including details on [[Chobham armor]]. He claims to have met [[Mahmoud Amirian]] (Tudeh Party) and [[Sayeed Mehdi Kashani]] (Shi'ite opposition) at Tehran University in 1977 and to have warned Israeli intelligence of an impending Iranian Revolution in 1978. In March 1978, he claims to have undertaken a mission to [[Nicaragua]] to establish communication with the [[Sandinistas]], where he met [[Marie Fernanda]] (Freddie), who later became pregnant with their daughter, Herut. The [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] dismissed his warnings about Iran in April 1978.[^3] +Critics dispute the seniority he claims. Israel has generally characterized him as a low-level translator rather than a policy insider, and the journalist [[Steven Emerson]], writing in 1991, argued that Ben-Menashe had inflated a minor translating job into a record of "key positions."[^3] The Israeli government acknowledged that he had worked for military intelligence in a translation capacity but denied that he had held the senior operational role he described.[^7] The disagreement over his rank has shaped the reception of all his later claims, because his accounts of arms deals, the October Surprise, and Israeli operations rest on his asserted firsthand access rather than on corroborating documents or witnesses.[^2][^3] -In December 1978, he claims involvement in a plan to assassinate [[Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini]] alongside [[Rafael Eitan|Rafi]] and Col. Assaf Heftez. [[Ruth Ben-David]] acted as an emissary between [[Menachem Begin]] and Khomeini in December 1978. The Shah left Iran in January 1979, and F-14 jets were flown out by Israeli aircrews. He attended an Israel-U.S. intelligence exchange conference in September 1979 at which he criticized the U.S. attitude, including that of [[Jack Varona]], [[Robert Gates]], and [[Stansfield Turner]]. Following the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in November 1979, he observed [[Jimmy Carter]]'s handling of the situation and the involvement of the Hashemi brothers in arms-for-hostages contacts.[^3] +### Arms Case and Acquittal -### October Surprise Allegations +Ben-Menashe first drew wide public attention when he was arrested in the United States in November 1989 and charged under the Arms Export Control Act with attempting to broker the sale of three Israeli-owned Lockheed [[C-130 Hercules]] transport aircraft to Iran, a deal valued at about 36 million dollars, using false end-user certificates.[^4] The prosecution was brought in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the related rulings carried the caption United States v. Menashe.[^14] He spent nearly a year in custody before a jury acquitted him and a co-defendant on November 28, 1990, after his defense argued, and the jury accepted, that he had been acting under the authority of the Israeli government in a transaction tied to Israel's arms dealings with Iran.[^4] -The claims in this section are Ben-Menashe's own account from *Profits of War* and are presented as he recorded them. The House October Surprise Task Force found no evidence to substantiate his specific allegations.[^2] +Israel denied that he had been authorized to act for it in the transaction, repeating the position that he had been only a translator.[^4] The acquittal nonetheless rested on the jury's willingness to credit his Israeli-agent defense, and he afterward cited the verdict as vindication of his broader account, even though the bodies that later examined his substantive claims rejected them.[^2][^6] The acquittal gave him a platform from which he expanded a series of claims about secret United States and Israeli arms networks, set out in his 1992 book [[Profits of War]].[^5] -[[Miles Copeland]]'s group of CIA-connected officers, along with [[William J. Casey]], [[Robert McFarlane]], and [[Earl Brian]], became involved in secret negotiations with the Iranians. [[David Kimche]] (Mossad Tevel) initiated a secret arms supply to Iran via [[South Africa]] in September 1979. [[Rafael Eitan|Rafi]] established a network with Senator [[John Tower]], McFarlane, and Brian.[^3] +### October Surprise and Iran-Contra Claims -The first Madrid meeting (March 1980) involved [[Mehdi Karrubi]], Kashani, [[Ahmed Omshei]], Casey, McFarlane, and [[Donald Gregg]]. [[Shimon Peres]] also secretly met with Karrubi. The sale of tires to Iran in April 1980 led to [[Jimmy Carter]]'s anger. The [[Operation Eagle Claw]] rescue mission failed in April 1980. A second Madrid meeting in May 1980 included Karrubi, Kashani, Omshei, [[Khosro Fakhrieh]], Casey, Gates, McFarlane, and Brian, where Republicans were observed delaying hostage release for political gain. The [[KGB]] made inquiries about Israeli intelligence in 1980. The Israeli Cabinet issued a directive in August 1980 to cooperate with the Republican camp.[^3] +In Profits of War and in congressional testimony, Ben-Menashe alleged that Israeli officials, working with figures around the 1980 [[Ronald Reagan]] presidential campaign, arranged arms sales to Iran in exchange for delaying the release of American hostages until after the November 1980 election, the scenario known as the October Surprise.[^5] He claimed to have witnessed a Paris meeting in October 1980 attended by [[George H.W. Bush]], the campaign manager [[William J. Casey|William Casey]], and Iranian representatives.[^6] -An Amsterdam meeting in August 1980 involved Kashani, Iranian officials, and [[Cyrus Husseinzadeh]] (SAVAMA), where an Iranian arms shopping list was presented. The Iraqi invasion of Iran occurred in September 1980. A fourth Madrid/Barcelona meeting involved [[George H.W. Bush]] and Karrubi.[^3] +His detailed account named a sequence of secret meetings. He described [[Miles Copeland]]'s group of CIA-connected officers, Casey, [[Robert McFarlane]], and [[Earl Brian]] entering negotiations with the Iranians, and [[David Kimche]] of Mossad initiating an arms supply to Iran via [[South Africa]] in 1979. He placed first and second Madrid meetings in March and May 1980 involving [[Mehdi Karrubi]], Casey, McFarlane, [[Donald Gregg]], [[Robert Gates]], and Brian; an Amsterdam meeting in August 1980; and the October 1980 Paris meeting at which he says the hostage-release deal was sealed and after which he received 56 million dollars in [[Guatemala]] in December 1980, with 4 million for Brian and 52 million for the Iranian intermediary Kashani. The hostages were released on Reagan's inauguration day, January 20, 1981.[^5] He further alleged a 1980 to 1981 [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee]] arms pipeline, a role in the June 7, 1981 [[Israel Air Force]] strike on Iraq's Tammuz nuclear reactor, the recruitment of Daily Mirror foreign editor [[Nicholas Davies]] by Mossad, and the use of a slush fund (the [[Ora Group]]) to finance the [[Likud Party]] and "black" operations including, in his telling, the 1985 [[Achille Lauro]] hijacking.[^5] -A Paris meeting in October 1980 included Bush, Casey, Karrubi, Gates, [[George Cave]], Gregg, Kimche, [[Shmuel Morieh]], [[Uri Simchoni]], Rafi, Ben-Menashe, and [[Simon Gabbay]], where the hostage release deal was sealed. Ben-Menashe received $56 million in [[Guatemala]] in December 1980 from a Saudi ambassador ([[Faissal Ghows]]), with $4 million designated for Brian and $52 million for Kashani. He met Gates at Miami airport for the money transfer. Profits from tire and wheelbase sales ($956,000) were used to initiate a slush fund. The hostages were released on [[Ronald Reagan]]'s inauguration day, January 20, 1981.[^3] - -In the fall of 1980, the [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee]] was formed to supply arms to Iran, with initial members including Kimche, Morieh, Simchoni, [[Moshe Hebroni]], Rafi, and Ben-Menashe. In February 1981, at a Vienna arms supply conference, a $1 billion deal was struck for F-4 parts, artillery shells, mortars, AK-47s, air-to-surface missiles, Chieftain tank engines, and C-130s. Ben-Menashe made his first trip to post-revolutionary Tehran in February 1981 under the alias "William Grace," meeting Iranian Defense Ministry officials and the Air Force commander. Concerns about the Iraqi nuclear reactor ([[Tammuz 17]]) led to a Mossad operation to plant a homing device.[^3] - -A meeting in southern France in March 1981 between [[Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr]] and [[Moshe Arens]] fixed June 7 for the reactor attack. The [[Israel Air Force]] attacked Tammuz 17 on June 7, 1981, with pilots including Col. [[Yoram Eitan]] and [[Yair Shamir]]. Weapons flights from Ben-Gurion Airport to Tehran via Argentinean charters began in March 1981. A [[KGB]] inquiry about the flights led to a Soviet shootdown of a cargo plane in July 1981.[^3] - -The [[Ora Group]] was formed as a flagship for the slush fund. A New York operation on John Street was established for electronic equipment but was compromised when a Swiss woman leaked information to [[Leslie M. Gelb]] of the New York Times. Rafi used South African intelligence to deal with the Swiss woman.[^3] - -A strategic U.S.-Israeli agreement involving [[Ariel Sharon]], Gates, and McFarlane allowed the resale of older U.S. arms. Money from arms sales was routed through U.S. banks including Chicago-Tokyo Bank, Chemical Bank, Bank One, and Valley National Bank of Arizona. Smokescreen operations involved private arms brokers including [[John Hortrich]] (alias John de Laroque) and [[Bernard Velliot]]. [[Nicholas Davies]], foreign editor of the London Daily Mirror, was recruited by Mossad.[^3] - -A [[TOW missile]] deal in 1983 involved [[Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani]] and Kashani, with a deception campaign involving [[Arieh Jacobson]] and [[Abraham Bar David]]. A T-80 tank was acquired from Iran in 1985. The slush fund financed the [[Likud Party]] (under [[Yitzhak Shamir]] and [[Ehud Olmert]]) and "black" operations.[^3] - -[[Mohammed Radi Abdullah]], a former Jordanian Army Colonel, was involved in "black" operations selling arms to Palestinian groups including [[Abu Nidal]] for intelligence purposes. The [[Achille Lauro]] hijacking in 1985 is described by Ben-Menashe as an Israeli "black" propaganda operation. Contributions were made to [[AIPAC]] and the Jewish Reform Movement. The Mossad European headquarters moved to London in 1982.[^3] - -During the [[Falklands War]], Israel froze arms sales to [[Argentina]], and the [[United Kingdom]] reimbursed Israel. [[Australia]] was used for "parking purposes" for C-130s from [[Vietnam]], artillery shells from [[North Korea]], TOW missiles, and [[Silkworm missile]]s from [[China]].[^3] - -A contribution was made to the West Australian Labor Party in February 1987, involving [[Richard Babayan]], Brian, [[Hadron]], [[Yosef Goldberg]], [[Alan Bond]], [[John Curtin Foundation]], [[Robert Maxwell]], and the Pergamon Press Trust Fund.[^3] +No official body endorsed this account. The [[House October Surprise Task Force]], chaired by Representative [[Lee Hamilton]], published its joint report on January 3, 1993, and rejected it, saying it had conclusive evidence from travel and passport records that Ben-Menashe was not in Paris when he claimed to have witnessed the meeting, and describing his testimony as "totally lacking in credibility," "demonstrably false from beginning to end," and "a total fabrication."[^6] A separate review of the Iran-Contra-related allegations conducted under Attorney General [[William Barr]] likewise found no credible basis for his key claims, and an earlier Senate examination reached similar conclusions.[^6][^7] ### PROMIS Affidavits and INSLAW -After [[Danny Casolaro]]'s death in August 1991, Ben-Menashe called [[Bill Hamilton]], president of [[INSLAW]], and claimed that two FBI agents from Lexington, Kentucky - including one named E.B. Cartinhour - had been en route to Martinsburg to give Casolaro evidence that the FBI was illegally using PROMIS software. He stated one agent was disaffected because his superiors had refused to indict senior Reagan officials for their October Surprise role.[^1] +After the journalist [[Danny Casolaro]]'s death in August 1991, Ben-Menashe called [[Bill Hamilton]], president of [[INSLAW|Inslaw]], and claimed that two FBI agents from Lexington, Kentucky, had been en route to Martinsburg to give Casolaro evidence that the FBI was illegally using PROMIS software, one of them disaffected because his superiors had refused to indict senior Reagan officials over the October Surprise.[^19] In affidavits submitted to the bankruptcy court in February and March 1991, he claimed personal knowledge of Earl Brian's involvement in international PROMIS distribution, alleging that Brian made a 1987 presentation to Israeli Military Intelligence claiming ownership of PROMIS rights, that [[Rafael Eitan]] received PROMIS from Brian and McFarlane in 1982 for Israeli signals intelligence, and that enhanced PROMIS was sold to the Israeli intelligence community, the Singapore Armed Forces, the Soviet Union, and Canada.[^20] These PROMIS-distribution claims were later amplified by [[Seymour Hersh]] in [[The Samson Option]] and [[Gordon Thomas]] in [[Gideon's Spies]].[^8][^9] -In two affidavits dated February 17 and March 21, 1991, submitted to the Bankruptcy Court, Ben-Menashe claimed personal knowledge of Brian's involvement in international PROMIS distribution. He alleged Brian made a 1987 presentation to Israeli Military Intelligence's External Relations Department claiming ownership of PROMIS rights and stating that the CIA, NSA, DOJ, and Israeli intelligence had been using the software since 1982. He further alleged a 1982 meeting at which [[Rafael Eitan]] received PROMIS from Brian and McFarlane for the Israeli Defense Force Signals Intelligence unit. He claimed knowledge of the 1987 sale of Enhanced PROMIS to the Israeli intelligence community and the Singapore Armed Forces, a public-domain version sold by the Israeli government to the Soviet Union, and an enhanced version sold to Canada.[^2] +The special counsel [[Nicholas Bua]], in his 1993 report on the Inslaw affair, rejected these claims. When interviewed, Ben-Menashe gave a substantially different account, stating that he had no knowledge of the transfer of Inslaw's proprietary software, and that the "PROMIS" in his affidavits referred not to Inslaw's product but to an NSA program he called "Milon," a dictionary-compilation tool developed independently before Inslaw existed; he admitted he had allowed the Hamiltons and others to assume he meant Inslaw's PROMIS "to promote his book."[^20] The NSA confirmed that its own internal Product Related On-line Management Information System, also called PROMIS, was written in M204 rather than COBOL and was wholly unrelated to Inslaw's software. The House October Surprise Task Force, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the special counsel all found his testimony fabricated and unsupported.[^10][^20] -### Credibility Assessment +### Claims about Robert Maxwell -Special Counsel [[Nicholas J. Bua]]'s investigation found Ben-Menashe's claims unsupported by credible evidence. When interviewed, Ben-Menashe provided a substantially different account: he stated he had no knowledge of the transfer of INSLAW's proprietary software by Brian or DOJ. He claimed the "PROMIS" in his affidavits referred not to INSLAW's PROMIS but to an NSA program called "Milon" (phonetic), a dictionary-compilation tool developed independently of INSLAW before the company existed. He admitted he allowed the Hamiltons and others to assume he meant INSLAW's PROMIS "to promote his book." The NSA confirmed its internal Product Related On-line Management Information System, also called PROMIS, was written in M204 rather than COBOL, served entirely different functions, and was wholly unrelated to INSLAW's software.[^2] +Ben-Menashe alleged that the publisher Robert Maxwell and Nicholas Davies were long-time assets of Israeli intelligence and that Maxwell had close ties to the prime minister's office.[^5] One specific claim concerned the 1986 case of the nuclear technician [[Mordechai Vanunu]], whose account of [[Dimona]] reached the Maxwell-owned [[Sunday Mirror]]; Ben-Menashe said Davies alerted Israeli intelligence to the approach and introduced him to Vanunu's intermediary [[Oscar Guerrero]], and that a Vanunu photograph published by the Sunday Mirror had been flown in from Israel, although the photograph in question had in fact been taken by the [[Sunday Times]] journalist [[Peter Hounam]], undercutting that detail.[^15] Hersh's 1991 book and the parliamentary statements that followed brought the Maxwell allegations into the open shortly before Maxwell's death, and Maxwell sued Hersh for libel before the action lapsed.[^8] No declassified material has confirmed the allegations.[^2] -The House October Surprise Task Force, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Special Counsel all found Ben-Menashe's testimony "totally lacking in credibility," "fabricated," and "demonstrably false from beginning to end." The October Surprise Task Force found no evidence for his specific allegations regarding a Casey-Brian trip to Iran. The Special Counsel concluded that Ben-Menashe's account offered no evidentiary support for the allegation that DOJ and Brian conspired to steal and distribute INSLAW's software.[^2] +### Epstein and Maxwell Allegations + +Beginning in 2019, Ben-Menashe gave interviews, including to the journalist [[Whitney Webb]] of MintPress News and to the outlet Narativ, in which he claimed that he had met Jeffrey Epstein and [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] in the 1980s, that he had seen Epstein in Robert Maxwell's offices, and that Maxwell had recruited Epstein for Israeli intelligence and introduced him as pre-approved by figures in Aman.[^11] He characterized the later Epstein operation as a "honeytrap" that gathered sexual blackmail material on powerful figures for Israeli intelligence.[^11] + +No corroborating witness, document, or official admission has been produced to support these specific claims, and reviewers have noted that they rest solely on his own assertions against a documented record of unreliability.[^2][^12] His account also conflicts with the established chronology of Epstein's career, since Epstein's documented entry into Ghislaine Maxwell's circle is generally dated to the period after Robert Maxwell's 1991 death rather than to the 1980s meetings Ben-Menashe described.[^12] He has continued to make related claims, including a 2025 assertion that [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] held Epstein-related files, that likewise remain unverified.[^12] + +### Lobbying and Consulting + +After his intelligence-related notoriety, Ben-Menashe built a lobbying and consulting practice through the [[Montreal]]-based firm [[Dickens & Madson]], representing controversial governments and figures.[^13] His involvement with the government of [[Robert Mugabe]] in [[Zimbabwe]] featured in the treason prosecution of the opposition leader [[Morgan Tsvangirai]], built on a videotape in which prosecutors said Tsvangirai discussed the "elimination" of Mugabe with Ben-Menashe; Tsvangirai was acquitted of high treason on October 14, 2004, by Judge [[Paddington Garwe]] of the Harare High Court, who found no proof of the alleged request, ruled that Ben-Menashe's testimony had to be treated with caution, and called some of it clearly false.[^16] + +He later registered a 2 million dollar contract in March 2021 to lobby for the [[Myanmar]] military junta after its coup, agreeing to advise on evading United States sanctions, and took on engagements connected to [[Sudan]] and its militia leader [[Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo]], a roughly 12 million dollar Zimbabwe land transaction funded by the criminal financier [[Paul Le Roux]] in 2007 and 2008 in which the promised farmland was never delivered, a reported 1 million dollar arrangement with [[Kyrgyzstan]], and work tied to [[Libya]], the [[Republic of the Congo]], [[Venezuela]], and the [[Tigray]] conflict in [[Ethiopia]].[^13][^17] Washington figures quoted in profiles of his career described his reputation as "poisonous."[^13] + +### The McFarlane Libel Suit + +The former national security adviser Robert McFarlane sued Ben-Menashe and the publisher of Profits of War, Sheridan Square Press, for libel over passages that linked McFarlane to the covert dealings Ben-Menashe described.[^18] The case, McFarlane v. Sheridan Square Press, reached the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which ruled in 1996. Applying the [[actual malice]] standard required for a public figure, the court held that McFarlane could not show the publisher had acted with reckless disregard for the truth merely because Ben-Menashe was a doubtful source, and it affirmed dismissal of the suit. The outcome turned on the high bar a public-figure plaintiff must clear rather than on any finding that Ben-Menashe's account was true.[^18] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010. -[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice. *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.* March 1993. -[^3]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* TrineDay, 1992. +[^1]: "Ari Ben-Menashe - Biography," *JewAge.* https://www.jewage.org/wiki/en/Article:Ari_Ben-Menashe_-_Biography +[^2]: "Who is Ari Ben-Menashe, what is his track record as a source," *Factually,* 2025. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/ari-ben-menashe-track-record-israeli-intelligence-source-epstein-claims-evaluation-ec9ba6 +[^3]: Emerson, Steven. "The Samson Option, by Seymour M. Hersh," *Commentary,* 1991. https://www.commentary.org/articles/steven-emerson/the-samson-option-by-seymour-m-hersh/ +[^4]: "2 Acquitted of Trying to Sell Military Cargo Planes to Iran," *The Washington Post,* 1990. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/11/29/2-acquitted-of-trying-to-sell-military-cargo-planes-to-iran/2918bfd6-89a7-441a-a124-3b1916e90321/ +[^5]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* Sheridan Square Press, 1992. +[^6]: "Probe by House finds no 'October surprise,'" *The Baltimore Sun,* 1993. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-01-13-1993013111-story.html +[^7]: "Espionage: Con Man or Key to a Mystery?," *Time,* 1991. https://time.com/archive/6718038/espionage-con-man-or-key-to-a-mystery/ +[^8]: "Fact or fiction? The claims of Ari Ben-Menashe," *Green Left,* 1992. https://www.greenleft.org.au/1992/42/fact-or-fiction-claims-ari-ben-menashe +[^9]: Pipes, Daniel. "Gideon's Spies by Gordon Thomas," *Commentary,* 1999. https://www.commentary.org/articles/daniel-pipes/gideons-spies-by-gordon-thomas/ +[^10]: "No wrong-doing in Inslaw affair, report says," *UPI,* 1993. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/06/17/No-wrong-doing-in-Inslaw-affair-report-says/5482740289600/ +[^11]: "Former Israeli Spy Ari Ben-Menashe on Israel's Relationship with Epstein," *MintPress News,* 2019. https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben-menashe-israel-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/263465/ +[^12]: "What did Ari Ben-Menashe claim about Jeffrey Epstein," *Factually,* 2025. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/ari-ben-menashe-claims-jeffrey-epstein-mossad-d56c30 +[^13]: "The Man of Mystery Hustling Myanmar," *Washington Monthly,* 2021. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/the-man-of-mystery-hustling-myanmar/ +[^14]: United States v. Menashe, 741 F. Supp. 1135 (S.D.N.Y. 1990). +[^15]: "The Vanunu affair and the Sunday Mirror photograph," contemporaneous press reporting noting the photograph was taken by Sunday Times journalist Peter Hounam, undercutting Ben-Menashe's account. +[^16]: "Tsvangirai acquitted of treason in Zimbabwe," *The Globe and Mail,* 2004. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/tsvangirai-acquitted-of-treason-in-zimbabwe/article18275151/ +[^17]: "The Curious Case of Bishkek's $1 Million Deal With Ex-Israeli Intelligence Worker," *Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,* 2021. https://www.rferl.org/a/the-curious-case-of-bishkek-s-1-million-deal-with-ex-israeli-intelligence-worker-/31033365.html +[^18]: McFarlane v. Sheridan Square Press, Inc., 91 F.3d 1501 (D.C. Cir. 1996). +[^19]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010, on Ben-Menashe's call to Bill Hamilton after Casolaro's death. +[^20]: U.S. Department of Justice. *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.* March 1993, on the PROMIS affidavits, the "Milon" recantation, and the finding that Ben-Menashe's account offered no evidentiary support for the Inslaw allegations. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Bill Clinton.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Bill Clinton.md index b252d7a7..a077a68e 100644 --- a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Bill Clinton.md +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Bill Clinton.md @@ -1,32 +1,89 @@ --- -title: Bill Clinton -aliases: - - Bill Clinton - - William Jefferson Clinton -created: 2026-05-17 -updated: 2026-05-17 category: "Intelligence & Government" tags: - Person - Politician + - BillClinton + - Arkansas - DarkAllianceInvestigation - ContraWar - - Arkansas -summary: "William Jefferson 'Bill' Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001) and Governor of Arkansas during the period when Barry Seal operated his CIA-connected cocaine smuggling operation at Mena airport." + - STARGATE + - JeffreyEpstein + - ClintonFoundation + - FlightLogs + - LolitaExpress +alias: + - Bill Clinton + - William Jefferson Clinton + - William Jefferson Blythe III +summary: "Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States and Governor of Arkansas during the Mena CIA-linked drug-smuggling period, whose administration terminated Project Stargate in 1995, and who took multiple flights on Jeffrey Epstein's aircraft for Clinton Foundation work in 2002-2003 while denying any knowledge of Epstein's crimes." born: 1946-08-19 location: "Hope, Arkansas" +created: 2026-05-17 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001. His administration oversaw the declassification and termination of the [[STARGATE PROJECT]] in 1995.[^1] While the *Remote Viewers* text does not detail Clinton's direct involvement with the project, it notes that [[William Perry]], who served as Clinton's Secretary of Defense, had previously been involved in funding decisions for the program during the Carter administration.[^1] +Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as Governor of [[Arkansas]] and as the 42nd President of the [[United States]] from 1993 to 2001. After leaving office he established the [[Clinton Foundation]] and traveled internationally on its behalf, including on aircraft owned by [[Jeffrey Epstein]]. Flight logs entered into civil litigation list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, the aircraft journalists later nicknamed the "[[Lolita Express]]." Clinton has denied knowledge of Epstein's sexual offenses and has denied visiting Epstein's private island, [[Little St. James]]. No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced evidence that Clinton committed a crime in connection with Epstein.[^1][^2] ### Governor of Arkansas and the Mena Drug Operations -As Governor of [[Arkansas]], Clinton presided over the period when [[Barry Seal]] operated his [[Central Intelligence Agency]]-connected [[cocaine]] smuggling operation at Mena airport. Clinton's close friend [[Danny Ray Lasater]] was convicted as part of a major drug ring in Little Rock, raising questions about what the governor knew about the activities at [[Mena, Arkansas|Mena]].[^2] +As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton presided over the period when [[Barry Seal]] operated his [[Central Intelligence Agency]]-connected [[cocaine]] smuggling operation at Mena airport. Clinton's close friend [[Danny Ray Lasater]] was convicted as part of a major drug ring in Little Rock, raising questions about what the governor knew about the activities at [[Mena, Arkansas|Mena]].[^16] -Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified that troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport" and that "it was a CIA operation." Despite the scale of Seal's operations, which a letter from the Arkansas attorney general to U.S. Attorney General [[Ed Meese]] valued at $3 billion to $5 billion in smuggled drugs, the state government took no action to shut down the operation. Clinton's administration in Arkansas presided over the period when the Mena airport served as a hub for both drug trafficking and Contra supply operations.[^3] +Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified that troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport" and that "it was a CIA operation." Despite the scale of Seal's operations, which a letter from the Arkansas attorney general to U.S. Attorney General [[Ed Meese]] valued at 3 billion to 5 billion dollars in smuggled drugs, the state government took no action to shut down the operation. Clinton's administration in Arkansas presided over the period when the Mena airport served as a hub for both drug trafficking and Contra supply operations.[^16] + +### Project Stargate + +As president, Clinton's administration oversaw the 1995 declassification and termination of the [[STARGATE PROJECT]], the government's remote-viewing program, after a CIA-commissioned review concluded the program had no demonstrated intelligence value. The *Remote Viewers* account does not detail any direct involvement by Clinton in the program, but notes that [[William Perry]], who served as Clinton's Secretary of Defense, had earlier been involved in funding decisions for the program during the Carter administration.[^15] + +### Epstein Contacts and Flight Logs + +Epstein donated 1,000 dollars to Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and contributed to later Democratic fundraising, and Clinton Foundation records show a 25,000 dollar contribution from an Epstein-linked foundation in 2006, according to a timeline compiled by [[ABC News]]. Epstein and [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] were recorded as visitors during Clinton's presidency and were photographed at White House events. Clinton's spokesman has said the former president met Epstein privately on two occasions after leaving office, once at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse and once at the [[Clinton Global Initiative]] offices in Harlem.[^1] + +Flight logs released in civil litigation and later in document tranches list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, registration N908JE. Reporting on the logs in 2016 noted Clinton appearing on at least 26 flight "legs," a figure that counts individual segments of multi-stop trips rather than distinct journeys, and noted that he traveled on at least some legs without his [[United States Secret Service|Secret Service]] detail. Maxwell, recorded in the logs by the initials "GM," appears on the trips, as do entries read as the initials of Epstein assistant [[Sarah Kellen]]. The logs record who boarded which aircraft and when; they do not, on their face, establish what occurred at any destination.[^2][^3] + +[[FactCheck.org]], reviewing the manifests, counted six trips comprising the 26 flights between February 2002 and November 2003, the discrepancy between trip and leg counts arising from whether each take-off and landing is tallied separately. The documented segments included a February 2002 Miami-to-Westchester hop, a round trip from New York to London in March 2002, a May 2002 sequence through Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Brunei, a July 2002 stop tied to a wedding in Morocco, the September 2002 Africa tour, and a November 2003 routing through Brussels, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. President [[Donald Trump]] in 2025 claimed Clinton flew on the plane "27 or 28 times," a characterization FactCheck.org described as conflating the leg total with the number of trips; the same review found no flight log placing Clinton on an aircraft bound for the U.S. Virgin Islands.[^11] + +Maxwell, deposed in the Giuffre litigation, stated of the island that "just so we are clear, the allegations that Clinton had a meal on Jeffrey's island is 100 percent false." On one of the 2003 legs, from Oslo to the Russian city of Novosibirsk, the manifest listed Clinton, Epstein, the aide [[Doug Band]], and individuals identified by the initials "GM" and "SK." No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced a finding that Clinton witnessed or participated in any crime aboard the aircraft.[^12][^2] + +### 2002 Africa Trip + +Clinton departed on September 21, 2002, on a roughly nine-day trip through several African nations to advance the Clinton Foundation's early work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including efforts to expand access to antiretroviral medication for mothers with HIV. The itinerary ran through Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa and included a day spent with former South African President [[Nelson Mandela]]. FactCheck.org and reporting on the manifests counted this single trip as accounting for roughly 11 of the 26 logged flight legs.[^4][^11] + +The manifest for the outbound leg from New York to the Azores listed Clinton, the actors [[Kevin Spacey]] and [[Chris Tucker]], Epstein, Maxwell, and roughly a dozen others including Doug Band, the investor [[Ron Burkle]], [[Casey Wasserman]], former Transportation Secretary [[Rodney Slater]], and Clinton aides. Chris Tucker appears in the records on the outbound and subsequent legs of the African routing. Spacey, named on the flight log, later said he had flown with Epstein and a group described as young women and characterized his presence as incidental to the Foundation trip; he was never accused of wrongdoing in connection with it.[^4][^5] + +The trip was arranged in part through Doug Band, who served as a central organizer of Clinton's post-presidential travel and of the Foundation's network of donors and contacts during this period. Clinton said through a spokesman in 2002 that he regarded Epstein as "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets." After Epstein's 2019 arrest, Clinton's spokesman said the trips "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation."[^5][^1] + +### Denials and Statements + +After Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest, Clinton's spokesman Angel Urena issued a statement saying Clinton "knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York." The statement said Clinton had taken trips on Epstein's plane in 2002 and 2003 in connection with Foundation work, that staff and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg, that Clinton had not spoken to Epstein "in well over a decade," and that Clinton "has never been to Little St. James Island." The reference in that statement to Secret Service traveling on every leg sits alongside reporting on the logs indicating Clinton flew at least some segments without his detail, a discrepancy his office has not separately reconciled in public.[^1][^2] + +In his 2024 memoir *Citizen*, Clinton wrote that he wished he had never met Epstein, that traveling on Epstein's plane "was not worth the years of questioning afterward," and that he and Epstein discussed only "politics and economics." Clinton again denied visiting Little St. James and wrote that he had stopped contact with Epstein by the time of Epstein's 2005-2006 legal troubles in Florida. Clinton wrote that he had thought Epstein "odd" but had no knowledge of his crimes.[^6] + +In a deposition compelled by the [[House Oversight Committee]], conducted behind closed doors in late February 2026 near the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, Clinton again denied any knowledge of Epstein's offenses, stating "I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong" and "I saw nothing that ever gave me pause." It was the first time a former president had been compelled to testify before a congressional panel. In his opening remarks Clinton objected to the committee's separate deposition of his wife [[Hillary Clinton]], saying she "had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein" and "has no memory of even meeting him." Hillary Clinton was deposed and said she had no information relevant to the inquiry. Video of both depositions was released in early March 2026. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.[^13][^14] + +### References in Unsealed and Released Documents + +Documents unsealed in January 2024 in the defamation case [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] included deposition testimony from [[Johanna Sjoberg]], given in 2015, in which she testified that Epstein had once said "Clinton likes them young," which she clarified referred to "girls." Sjoberg attributed the remark to Epstein as something he said and not as a statement of her own knowledge about Clinton, and said she understood Epstein to have had "dealings" with him. The same filings referenced a 2011 account in which [[Virginia Giuffre]] said she had seen Clinton on Epstein's island; Giuffre later said she did not witness a helicopter flight she had earlier described, and she made no allegation of wrongdoing by Clinton. Reporting on the January 2024 release noted that the documents did not implicate any previously unnamed person and contained no accusation of a crime by Clinton. A judge in the Maxwell litigation had previously denied a request to depose Clinton.[^7][^8] + +Materials released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee and the [[United States Department of Justice|Department of Justice]] included flight records, estate documents, and a "birthday book" assembled by Maxwell for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The committee made the contents public in September 2025, and the panel released more than 33,000 pages from the Justice Department on September 2, 2025. The book contained an entry attributed to Clinton, the wording of which, as released by the committee, included the line "It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends," signed "Bill Clinton." Outlets reporting on the documents noted that the materials did not implicate Clinton in any crime.[^9][^10] + +On December 19, 2025, in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which set that date as the deadline for Attorney General [[Pam Bondi]] to publish the unclassified federal records, the Justice Department released several hundred thousand documents, many heavily redacted. Across the 2025 and 2026 releases, totaling more than 60,000 pages by late 2025, no document established a criminal allegation against Clinton, and reporting consistently noted that his name appeared in connection with the flight logs, social contacts, and the birthday book rather than any accusation by a survivor.[^10][^14] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997. -[^2]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 7: "Something happened to Ivan" -[^3]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 7: "Something happened to Ivan" +[^1]: "Timeline: Bill Clinton's interactions with Jeffrey Epstein," *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/US/timeline-bill-clintons-interactions-jeffrey-epstein/story?id=130567229 +[^2]: "Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender's jet much more than previously known," *Fox News,* 2016. https://www.foxnews.com/us/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known +[^3]: "Report: Bill Clinton Flew on Disgraced Donor's Jet 26 Times," *Roll Call,* 2016. https://rollcall.com/2016/05/13/report-bill-clinton-flew-on-disgraced-donors-jet-26-times/ +[^4]: "How well did Bill Clinton know Jeffrey Epstein?," *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/Politics/bill-clinton-jeffrey-epstein/story?id=127629827 +[^5]: "Kevin Spacey admits to flying with Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton and a group of young girls," *AOL,* 2025. https://www.aol.com/kevin-spacey-admits-flying-jeffrey-195850925.html +[^6]: "Bill Clinton denies visiting Epstein island in new memoir and wishes he 'had never met him'," *Fox News,* 2024. https://www.foxnews.com/us/bill-clinton-denies-visiting-epstein-island-new-memoir-wishes-he-had-never-met-him +[^7]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/ +[^8]: Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), unsealed exhibits, January 2024. https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Giuffre%20v.%20Maxwell,%20No.%20115-cv-07433%20(S.D.N.Y.%202015)/ +[^9]: "Bill Clinton letter in Epstein 'birthday book' among new files released by House Oversight Committee," *Fox News,* 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bill-clinton-letter-epstein-birthday-book-among-new-files-released-house-oversight-committee.amp +[^10]: "Epstein files totaling more than 60,000 pages have already been released this year. Here's what we've seen so far," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-released-2025-so-far/ +[^11]: "The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories," *FactCheck.org,* 2019, counting six trips and 26 flights, February 2002 to November 2003. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/08/the-epstein-connections-fueling-conspiracy-theories/ +[^12]: "The Biggest Names from Jeffrey Epstein's Unsealed Documents," *Time,* 2024, on the Maxwell deposition statement about the island. https://time.com/6552063/jeffrey-epsteins-unsealed-court-documents/ +[^13]: "Bill Clinton defends himself at House deposition on Epstein: 'I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,'" *CBS News,* 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-clinton-epstein-house-oversight-committee-deposition/ +[^14]: "Videos of Clinton depositions in Epstein investigation released," *The Washington Post,* 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/02/bill-hillary-clinton-deposition-videos/ +[^15]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, on the 1995 declassification and termination of the Stargate remote-viewing program and William Perry's earlier funding role. +[^16]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapter 7, on the Mena airport operations, Barry Seal, Danny Ray Lasater, and the Arkansas trooper testimony. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Cory Booker.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Cory Booker.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..233bb74d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Cory Booker.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - CoryBooker + - DemocraticParty + - NewJersey + - Senate + - SiliconValley + - Waywire + - Dialog +alias: + - Cory Anthony Booker + - Senator Cory Booker +summary: "Cory Booker is a U.S. Senator from New Jersey whose name appeared on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society and whose political rise was financed in part by Silicon Valley figures including Eric Schmidt, who backed his 2012 video startup Waywire." +born: 1969-04-27 +location: "Washington, D.C. (born); Newark, New Jersey (political base)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Cory Anthony Booker (born April 27, 1969, in [[Washington, D.C.]]) is an American politician who served as mayor of [[Newark]], [[New Jersey]], from 2006 to 2013 and has been a U.S. Senator from New Jersey since 2013. In June 2026 Booker was named by *WIRED* among the figures surfaced in the leak of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]]. His political career has been entwined with [[Silicon Valley]] money since his Newark mayoralty, most visibly through the 2012 video startup [[Waywire]], whose backers included former [[Google]] chairman [[Eric Schmidt]].[^1][^2] + +### Education and Newark Mayoralty + +Booker earned bachelor's and master's degrees from [[Stanford University]], won a [[Rhodes Scholarship]] to [[Oxford University]], and graduated from [[Yale Law School]]. He moved to Newark and won a seat on the city council before being elected mayor in 2006, holding the office until he entered the Senate. His mayoralty cultivated a national donor and media profile unusual for a mid-sized-city mayor, including a much-publicized relationship with technology-industry philanthropists; in 2010 he secured a 100 million dollar gift from [[Mark Zuckerberg]] for the Newark public schools, announced on the [[Oprah Winfrey]] program.[^3] + +In October 2013 Booker won a special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of [[Frank Lautenberg]], and he has been reelected to full terms since. In the Senate he has aligned with the [[Democratic Party]] establishment while maintaining the Silicon Valley fundraising base he built as mayor, drawing campaign contributions from technology executives and venture capitalists including [[Marc Andreessen]] and [[Reid Hoffman]].[^1][^3] + +### Waywire and the Silicon Valley Backers + +In 2012 Booker cofounded Waywire, a video-sharing and curation startup, with Nathan Richardson, formerly of Gilt City, and Sarah Ross. The venture raised roughly 1.75 million dollars in seed funding from a roster of backers that included Eric Schmidt, [[LinkedIn]] chief executive [[Jeff Weiner]], Oprah Winfrey, and the talent manager [[Troy Carter]]. The site launched publicly in April 2013, while Booker was simultaneously mayor of Newark and a declared Senate candidate.[^2][^4] + +A New York Times investigation by Nicholas Confessore, published August 7, 2013, reported that Booker held an equity stake in Waywire that his disclosure filings valued at between one million and five million dollars, and that several of the startup's investors had also donated to his Senate campaign. The reporting drew conflict-of-interest scrutiny because the same Silicon Valley figures financing his commercial venture were financing his political one. Amid the controversy, the company's underage profile of a media executive's teenage son drew criticism, and Waywire was sold to Magnify.net in October 2013; Booker pledged to give his proceeds from the stake to charity.[^2][^4][^5] + +### The 2026 Dialog Leak + +The June 16, 2026 *WIRED* report identified Booker on the Dialog roster as "Senator (D-NJ)," listing him among the sitting U.S. senators of both parties surfaced when the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] located a member directory in the source code of Dialog's website and a separate source provided the publication with the 222-name registration list for the society's August 2026 retreat near [[Dublin]]. *WIRED* placed Booker alongside fellow senator [[Ted Cruz]] and Colorado governor [[Jared Polis]] among the political figures on the list.[^1] + +Dialog was cofounded by Thiel and Auren Hoffman, the data broker behind [[SafeGraph]] and [[LiveRamp]]. The roster listed Booker among the society's technology, finance, and political registrants.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Examining Cory Booker's Tech Ties." *Inc.,* 2013. https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/examining-cory-bookers-tech-ties.html +[^3]: "About Cory." Office of U.S. Senator Cory Booker. https://www.booker.senate.gov/about-cory +[^4]: Confessore, Nicholas. "Cory Booker, in Senate Race, Stresses Ties to Web Start-Ups." *New York Times,* August 7, 2013. Summarized in "Cory Booker's Silicon Valley cash." *Columbia Journalism Review,* 2013. https://www.cjr.org/the_audit/nyts_excellent_booker_startup.php +[^5]: "Cory Booker's Role In Startup Waywire Is Shady, Unsurprisingly." *The New Republic,* 2013. https://newrepublic.com/article/114197/cory-bookers-role-startup-waywire-shady-unsurprisingly diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Daniela Amodei.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Daniela Amodei.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5fc61325 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Daniela Amodei.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - OpenAI + - OpenPhilanthropy +alias: + - Daniela Amodei +summary: "Daniela Amodei is the cofounder and president of Anthropic, who ran operations and people functions at Stripe and OpenAI before starting the company with her brother Dario, and who is married to Open Philanthropy cofounder Holden Karnofsky." +born: 1987 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Daniela Amodei (born 1987) is an American technology executive who cofounded and serves as president of [[Anthropic]], where she runs the company's operations, hiring, finance, legal, and policy functions. The younger sister of chief executive [[Dario Amodei]], she built operations and people organizations at Stripe and [[OpenAI]] before the siblings left OpenAI to start the company in 2021. She is married to [[Holden Karnofsky]], cofounder of [[Open Philanthropy]], an early Anthropic funder from the [[Effective Altruism]] movement.[^1][^2] + +### Background and Early Career + +Amodei was born in San Francisco, four years after her brother, to an Italian-American father and a Jewish-American mother. She took a bachelor's degree in English literature with a politics minor from the University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating in 2009, and began her career outside technology, including work as a congressional campaign staffer and at a global-health nonprofit. She joined the payments company Stripe as an early employee around 2013, where she worked in risk and operations and grew teams as the company scaled.[^1][^3] + +In 2018 Amodei moved to OpenAI, where she held senior operations and people roles and became vice president of safety and policy, overseeing the organization's recruiting, human resources, and parts of its policy and safety work during the period her brother led research. Profiles describe her as having run the "people" and operational side of OpenAI while Dario ran the technical side, the division of labor the two later reproduced at their own company.[^2][^3] + +### Anthropic + +When Dario and a group of OpenAI colleagues resigned in late 2020 over disagreements about the company's direction and safety posture, Daniela left with them, and the siblings incorporated Anthropic in early 2021 as a public-benefit corporation. As president she owns the non-research surface of the company: finance, legal, human resources, communications, policy, and the operational scaling of a firm that grew from a few dozen people to thousands within a few years. She and Dario were jointly named to the inaugural Time 100 AI list in 2023, and the firm's rising valuation made her one of the wealthiest self-made women in technology, with Forbes estimating her stake in the billions of dollars.[^1][^4] + +Anthropic drew much of its early capital from the effective-altruism world. Open Philanthropy, cofounded by her husband, was an early funder; in 2022 [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] invested roughly 500 million dollars through [[Alameda Research]] months before [[FTX]] collapsed; and later rounds drew Amazon and Google. Both Amodeis have publicly distanced themselves from the effective-altruism label even as critics noted the density of the ties, and Dario has said the company kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares.[^2][^5] + +### Governance and the Long-Term Benefit Trust + +Amodei oversaw the construction of Anthropic's unusual governance, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, formally established in September 2023 and holding a special class of stock that lets a body of trustees insulated from shareholders elect and remove a growing share of the board over time, an arrangement intended to weight safety over investor returns. The structure echoed the nonprofit-control design that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, and as president she manages the relationship between that trust, the board, and the company's commercial investors.[^6][^7] + +Amodei married Holden Karnofsky in August 2017 in a ceremony its guests later described as effective-altruism themed, and the two had earlier lived in a shared house with figures from the [[Rationalist Community]] and the early effective-altruism scene, in which Karnofsky and Dario were among the housemates. Karnofsky co-led Open Philanthropy, the largest sustained funder of AI-safety work, before taking a leave to focus on AI strategy and joining Anthropic in January 2025 to work on the company's responsible-scaling and safety policies. He had previously held an OpenAI board seat tied to a 2017 Open Philanthropy grant, which he resigned in 2021 after his wife cofounded the competing lab.[^8][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Daniela Amodei," *Bloomberg* executive profile, and "Dario and Daniela Amodei," *TIME* 100 AI 2023, on the 1987 San Francisco birth, the UC Santa Cruz literature degree, the Stripe and OpenAI background, and the Anthropic presidency. https://time.com/collections/time100-ai/6309047/daniela-and-dario-amodei/ +[^2]: "Who Funds the AI Safety Watchdogs," Inside The Black Box, on Daniela Amodei's OpenAI safety-and-policy role, the marriage to Karnofsky, and Open Philanthropy as an Anthropic funder. https://itbb.substack.com/p/who-funds-the-watchdogs +[^3]: "Daniela Amodei: Helpful, Honest, Harmless AI," Stanford eCorner / STVP podcast, on her Stripe risk-and-operations work, her OpenAI operations and people roles, and the operational scope of her Anthropic presidency. https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/daniela-amodei-anthropic-helpful-honest-harmless-ai +[^4]: "Anthropic co-founders become billionaires after massive funding round," *Bloomberg,* March 4, 2025, on the founders' wealth following Anthropic's valuation increase. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-04/anthropic-co-founders-become-billionaires-after-massive-funding-round +[^5]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 2022 Bankman-Fried investment via Alameda Research and the later Amazon and Google rounds. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html +[^6]: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," Anthropic, September 2023, on the special Class T shares and the trustees' authority to elect and remove directors. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust +[^7]: "Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, has a weird structure too," *Slate,* December 2023, on the Long-Term Benefit Trust and the parallel to OpenAI's nonprofit-control crisis. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/anthropic-openai-board-trust-effective-altruism.html +[^8]: "Karnofsky and Daniela Amodei married in an effective-altruism-theme ceremony," widely circulated account of the August 2017 wedding; "Holden Karnofsky," on the marriage and the shared rationalist-scene household with Dario Amodei. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBxP/anthropic-is-not-being-consistently-candid-about-their +[^9]: "Anthropic Hired President Daniela Amodei's Husband to Work on Its AI Safety Plan," *Fortune,* February 13, 2025, on Karnofsky's January 2025 move to Anthropic, his Open Philanthropy leadership, and his earlier OpenAI board seat resigned in 2021. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/13/anthropic-hired-president-daniela-amodei-husband-ai-safety-responsible-scaling diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Dario Amodei.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Dario Amodei.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..243d6e53 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Dario Amodei.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - AISafety + - EffectiveAltruism + - OpenAI +alias: + - Dario Amodei +summary: "Dario Amodei is the cofounder and chief executive of Anthropic, a physicist and computational neuroscientist who led GPT-2 and GPT-3 as OpenAI's vice president of research before leaving in 2020 with a group of colleagues to build a rival AI lab." +born: 1983 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an American AI researcher and entrepreneur who cofounded and serves as chief executive of [[Anthropic]]. Trained as a physicist and computational neuroscientist, he led the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3 as vice president of research at [[OpenAI]], then left in late 2020 with his sister [[Daniela Amodei]] and a group of OpenAI colleagues to found a competing lab built around the thesis that advanced AI should be developed under strict safety constraints. He emerged from the [[Effective Altruism]] milieu, took the Giving What We Can pledge, and is the author of the October 2024 essay "Machines of Loving Grace."[^1][^2] + +### Education and Early Career + +Amodei was born in San Francisco to Riccardo Amodei, an Italian-American leather craftsman from Tuscany, and Elena Engel, a Jewish-American library project manager from Chicago. He attended Lowell High School, began his undergraduate study in physics at Caltech, and transferred to [[Stanford University]], where he took a bachelor's degree in physics in 2006. He completed a PhD in biophysics at [[Princeton University]] in 2011 as a Hertz Foundation Fellow, with a thesis titled "Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits" supervised by Michael Berry and William Bialek, and won the Hertz thesis prize. He then did postdoctoral work at the Stanford University School of Medicine.[^1][^3] + +His move into machine learning ran through industry research labs. He worked at the Chinese search company Baidu from November 2014 to October 2015 under Andrew Ng, where his work on the relationship between model performance, data, and compute contributed to the empirical "scaling laws" that later became central to his worldview, and then at Google Brain as a senior research scientist. In 2016 he joined OpenAI, where over the next four years he rose to vice president of research and helped pioneer reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment technique that underpins modern conversational models.[^1][^3] + +### OpenAI and the Departure + +At OpenAI, Amodei directed the team that built the GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models, the latter consuming a reported 50 to 60 percent of the company's compute and tens of millions of dollars to train. He also ran the safety team and co-authored the 2020 "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" paper, which formalized the observation that model capability grows predictably with size, data, and compute. That empirical result became the foundation of his conviction that simply scaling up models would keep producing more powerful systems, a thesis he carried into Anthropic.[^3][^4] + +A faction around Amodei came into conflict with OpenAI's leadership over the direction of the company, the pace of commercialization, and the 2019 [[Microsoft]] investment and capped-profit restructuring. One colleague later described the period as one in which roughly half the team's time went to arguing internal disagreements rather than research. In December 2020 Amodei resigned, and over the following months he and a group of senior OpenAI staff, including his sister Daniela, departed to start their own lab; the company has been described as founded by seven former OpenAI employees, with the broader founding cohort including [[Jared Kaplan]], [[Jack Clark]], [[Chris Olah]], Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish, and Ben Mann.[^1][^4] + +### Anthropic and the Scaling Thesis + +Amodei incorporated Anthropic in early 2021 as a public-benefit corporation, with Daniela as president, and the two raised money from funders tied to effective altruism, including [[Open Philanthropy]], whose cofounder [[Holden Karnofsky]] is married to Daniela. In 2022 the company took a roughly 500-million-dollar investment from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] through [[Alameda Research]] months before the [[FTX]] collapse, and later raised tens of billions from [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]] and Google. Amodei has positioned Anthropic publicly as the safety-conscious frontier lab, championing a "Responsible Scaling Policy" of capability thresholds even as the company competes directly at the frontier.[^2][^5] + +Amodei is a prominent voice on both AI risk and AI optimism. In October 2024 he published "Machines of Loving Grace," a roughly 14,000-word essay arguing that "powerful AI," which he likens to "a country of geniuses in a datacenter," could compress decades of progress in biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance, and the meaning of work into five to ten years; he opened it by stating that "most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be." He has separately warned that AI could eliminate a large share of entry-level white-collar jobs, testified and written on the danger of authoritarian misuse, and argued for export controls to keep advanced chips from China. Forbes estimated his net worth at roughly 15.5 billion dollars in mid-2026 as Anthropic's valuation climbed.[^6][^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Steven Levy, "How Anthropic's Dario Amodei Is Building the AI of the Future," *Wired,* and contemporaneous profiles, on the 1983 San Francisco birth, parents Riccardo Amodei and Elena Engel, Lowell High School, Caltech and Stanford physics, the Princeton biophysics PhD, and the Baidu, Google Brain, and OpenAI career. https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai/ +[^2]: "Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, has a weird structure too," *Slate,* December 2023, on Anthropic's effective-altruism origins, the public-benefit incorporation, and the founding by former OpenAI researchers. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/anthropic-openai-board-trust-effective-altruism.html +[^3]: Dario Amodei et al., "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models," arXiv, January 2020; Hertz Foundation fellow and thesis-prize records, on the Princeton PhD and the scaling-laws work. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 +[^4]: Alex Kantrowitz, "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," on the GPT-2 and GPT-3 leadership, the compute share for GPT-3, the internal OpenAI conflict, and the December 2020 departure with colleagues to found Anthropic. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^5]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 2022 Bankman-Fried investment via Alameda Research and Anthropic's later valuations. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html +[^6]: Dario Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace," darioamodei.com, October 2024, on the "country of geniuses in a datacenter" framing, the five-to-ten-year timeline, and the opening claim about underestimating upside and risk. https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace +[^7]: "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs," contemporaneous press coverage of his Axios interview, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic +[^8]: "Dario Amodei," *Forbes* profile and real-time net-worth listing, on the mid-2026 net-worth estimate as Anthropic's valuation rose. https://www.forbes.com/profile/dario-amodei/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/David Chaum.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/David Chaum.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..93c9ae2a --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/David Chaum.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - DavidChaum + - Cryptography + - DigitalCash + - DigiCash + - Privacy + - Cryptocurrency +alias: + - David Lee Chaum + - David Chaum +summary: "David Chaum is the American cryptographer who invented anonymous digital cash, devised the mix network and the blind signature, wrote a 1982 dissertation that anticipated the blockchain, and built the DigiCash eCash system whose 1998 bankruptcy left the cypherpunks to pursue trustless money." +born: 1955 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +David Lee Chaum (born 1955) is an American cryptographer who founded the field of anonymous digital cash and privacy-preserving cryptography. In a series of papers beginning in 1981 he introduced the mix network for untraceable communication, the blind signature for untraceable payment, and the dining cryptographers protocol for unconditional sender anonymity, and his 1982 doctoral dissertation set out a system that anticipated much of the later blockchain. Through his company [[DigiCash]] he built [[eCash]], the first working electronic-money system, which depended on a bank as a trusted issuer and went bankrupt in 1998. The [[Cypherpunks]] built directly on his work, and the trustless designs that became [[Bitcoin]] were in part an effort to remove the central issuer his system required.[^1][^2] + +### Mix Networks and the Dining Cryptographers + +Chaum earned a doctorate in computer science from the [[University of California, Berkeley]], and taught there and at [[New York University]] before moving his research to the [[Netherlands]]. His 1981 paper "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms," published in Communications of the ACM, introduced the mix network, a chain of relay servers each of which receives a batch of encrypted messages, decrypts one layer, shuffles the order, and forwards them, so that no single relay and no outside observer can link a message entering the chain to one leaving it. The design is the conceptual ancestor of later anonymity systems including the onion-routing network Tor.[^3][^4] + +In 1988 Chaum published "The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability" in the Journal of Cryptology, which posed a puzzle: three cryptographers at dinner want to learn whether one of them paid the bill or whether their employer did, without revealing which of them paid. The protocol he derived, in which each participant shares a secret coin flip with a neighbor and announces the parity, lets the group compute whether any member sent a message while hiding which one did, with anonymity that holds even against an adversary with unlimited computing power. The construction, known as a DC-net, became a foundation of research into anonymous communication.[^5][^6] + +### Blind Signatures + +Chaum presented "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" at the CRYPTO '82 conference, published in the proceedings in 1983, building on the idea he had set out in his 1982 dissertation. A blind signature lets a signer certify a message without seeing its contents. In Chaum's payment scheme a customer generates a digital banknote with a serial number, multiplies it by a random blinding factor so the bank cannot read it, and sends the blinded value to the bank; the bank signs it and debits the customer's account, the customer divides out the blinding factor to recover a valid signed note, and when a merchant later deposits that note the bank sees its serial number for the first time and cannot connect it to the withdrawal.[^2][^7] + +The result was electronic money that was anonymous like physical cash yet unforgeable like a bank-signed instrument, since the bank's signature could not be reproduced without its private key and any attempt to spend the same note twice could be detected at deposit. The blind signature solved the central problem that had blocked anonymous digital payment, and it became the cryptographic core of every system Chaum built afterward. His 1985 paper "Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete" extended the approach into a broader scheme of pseudonymous credentials.[^2][^8] + +### The 1982 Dissertation + +Chaum's Berkeley dissertation, "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups," completed in 1982, described how a group of parties who do not trust one another could jointly operate a record-keeping system whose integrity none of them could subvert. The design specified a data structure in which entries were chained together by cryptographic references and replicated across the participants, so that the history could be audited and could not be altered after the fact without detection, and it included the code to implement the protocol.[^9][^10] + +Commentators who later compared the dissertation to the 2008 Bitcoin white paper observed that it contained most of the structural elements of a blockchain, including a chained, tamper-evident ledger maintained by a set of mutually distrustful participants, and that the principal element it lacked was proof-of-work, the mechanism by which an open, permissionless network reaches consensus without a fixed membership. The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute republished the dissertation in its library as an antecedent of the blockchain.[^9][^10] + +### DigiCash and eCash + +Chaum founded DigiCash in [[Amsterdam]] in 1990, after his cryptographic group at the CWI research center, to commercialize anonymous electronic cash. Its product, eCash, used Chaum's blind signatures to issue digital coins that a customer withdrew from a participating bank, stored on a personal computer, and spent at merchants, with the bank unable to trace where its issued coins were spent. DigiCash also ran a free trial currency called CyberBucks. In October 1994 the company demonstrated the first live payment over the World Wide Web.[^1][^11] + +Adoption never reached the scale the system needed. The Mark Twain Bank of St. Louis became the first licensee to offer eCash in 1995, followed in 1996 and afterward by [[Deutsche Bank]], [[Credit Suisse]], [[Bank Austria]], and a handful of others, but by 1998 the Mark Twain program had signed only about 300 merchants and 5,000 users. Reported negotiations with larger partners fell through, including a Visa investment and a Microsoft proposal to bundle eCash with Windows 95 over which Chaum and [[Bill Gates]] reportedly could not agree on terms. DigiCash filed for bankruptcy in November 1998. Chaum told Forbes the following year, "It was hard to get enough merchants to accept it, so that you could get enough consumers to use it, or vice versa."[^1][^12] + +eCash differed fundamentally from the cryptocurrencies that followed. A customer's payment was anonymous, but a bank had to issue every coin, validate it, and maintain the account ledger, so the system could not operate without a trusted central institution and could be shut down by removing that institution. The proof-of-work currencies that the cypherpunks went on to design, beginning with [[Adam Back]]'s [[Hashcash]], [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money, and [[Hal Finney]]'s reusable proof-of-work and culminating in [[Satoshi Nakamoto]]'s Bitcoin, replaced Chaum's trusted issuer with an open network that mints and validates its own units, removing the single point of control that had defined eCash.[^13][^2] + +### Later Work + +After DigiCash, Chaum continued to work on cryptographic systems, concentrating heavily on verifiable election technology. He designed end-to-end verifiable voting schemes including Punchscan and the in-person system Scantegrity, which was used in a binding municipal election in Takoma Park, Maryland, in 2009. In the cryptocurrency era he returned to digital money with the Elixxir and Praxxis projects and the xx network, and he proposed eCash-style privacy designs for central bank digital currencies, work in which his original blind-signature approach reappeared decades after DigiCash.[^14][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Genesis Files: How David Chaum's eCash Spawned a Cypherpunk Dream," *Bitcoin Magazine,* April 2018, on Chaum's biography, DigiCash founded 1990 in Amsterdam, eCash, the Mark Twain and Deutsche Bank licensees, the Visa and Microsoft talks, and the 1998 bankruptcy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-how-david-chaums-ecash-spawned-cypherpunk-dream +[^2]: Chaum, David. "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments," *Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of CRYPTO '82,* Springer, 1983, pp. 199-203, on the blind-signature payment scheme. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-0602-4_18 +[^3]: Chaum, David. "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms," *Communications of the ACM,* vol. 24, no. 2, February 1981, on the mix network. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358549.358563 +[^4]: "David Lee Chaum: The Pioneer of Digital Anonymity," *GNcrypto,* on the Berkeley doctorate, the mix network as ancestor of Tor, and his later election and currency work. https://www.gncrypto.news/news/david-lee-chaum-the-pioneer-of-digital-anonymity/ +[^5]: Chaum, David. "The Dining Cryptographers Problem: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Untraceability," *Journal of Cryptology,* vol. 1, no. 1, 1988, pp. 65-75. https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/chaum-dc.pdf +[^6]: "The Dining Cryptographers Problem," *Futility Closet,* on the 1988 protocol and DC-nets. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/10/03/the-dining-cryptographers-problem/ +[^7]: "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments," *Springer Nature Link,* citation record for the CRYPTO '82 paper published 1983. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-0602-4_18 +[^8]: Chaum, David. "Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete," *Communications of the ACM,* vol. 28, no. 10, October 1985, on pseudonymous credentials. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/4372.4373 +[^9]: Chaum, David. "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups," University of California, Berkeley, June 1982, on the chained, replicated, tamper-evident record maintained by mutually distrustful parties. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/computer-systems-by-mutually-suspicious-groups/ +[^10]: "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups," Satoshi Nakamoto Institute library entry, characterizing the 1982 dissertation as containing the elements of a blockchain except proof-of-work. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/computer-systems-by-mutually-suspicious-groups/ +[^11]: "DigiCash Idea Finds New Life in More Flexible eCash," *American Banker,* on the eCash system, the bank trials, and the demonstration of web payment. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/digicash-idea-finds-new-life-in-more-flexible-ecash +[^12]: "'82: The Birth of Digital Cash," Till Antonio Mahler, *blockwhat?,* on the Mark Twain Bank, the limited adoption figures, the Microsoft and Visa negotiations, and the November 1998 bankruptcy. https://medium.com/blockwhat/82-the-birth-of-digital-cash-ea08b53379d8 +[^13]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on the digital-cash precursors that removed the trusted issuer. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^14]: "Understanding David Chaum: Pioneer of Digital Privacy and Cryptography," *CoinStats,* on Scantegrity, the Takoma Park election, and the xx network. https://coinstats.app/news/0e7c5927f0be24286a2140761b3fb115289bd6e241174487562250ab1aef2645_Understanding-David-Chaum-Pioneer-of-Digital-Privacy-and-Cryptography/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Denise George.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Denise George.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..575ee955 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Denise George.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +category: "Law Enforcement & Legal" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - VirginIslands + - JPMorganChase + - GovernmentCapture + - AttorneyGeneral + - SouthernTrust +alias: + - Denise N. George + - Denise George-Counts +summary: "Denise George was the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General who sued Jeffrey Epstein's estate and JPMorgan Chase, and who was fired by the governor days after filing the JPMorgan suit." +location: "U.S. Virgin Islands" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Denise George was the seventeenth Attorney General of the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], serving from 2019 to 2023. [[Albert Bryan|Governor Albert Bryan Jr.]] nominated her in March 2019, and she took office in May, weeks before [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein's]] July 2019 federal arrest. She brought the territory's January 2020 civil enforcement suit against Epstein's estate and its December 2022 suit against [[JPMorgan Chase]]. Bryan fired her on December 31, 2022, four days after the JPMorgan filing, a sequence that raised questions about whether the litigation prompted her removal.[^1][^2] + +### Litigation Against the Epstein Estate + +George filed the territory's case against Epstein's estate on January 15, 2020, in the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands, under the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the territory's racketeering statute. The complaint alleged that Epstein created a network of shell companies, charitable organizations, and individuals that participated in a decades-long pattern of trafficking and sexual abuse of girls and young women at his Virgin Islands properties. She later amended the action to add the estate co-executors [[Darren Indyke]] and [[Richard Kahn]], [[Southern Trust Company]], and other Epstein-created entities as co-defendants.[^3][^4] + +The case settled on December 1, 2022. The estate agreed to pay the territory more than 105 million dollars in cash, to return roughly 80 million dollars in tax benefits the territory said Southern Trust Company had obtained fraudulently under the [[Economic Development Commission]] program, and to give the territory half the proceeds of the sale of [[Little St. James]]. George stated that the settlement restored the faith of the people of the Virgin Islands that its laws would be enforced against those who break them. In January 2023 the financier [[Leon Black]] agreed to pay the territory 62.5 million dollars to resolve potential Epstein-related claims.[^4][^5] + +### Suit Against JPMorgan Chase and Firing + +George filed the territory's suit against JPMorgan Chase on December 27, 2022 in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the bank knowingly facilitated, sustained, and concealed Epstein's trafficking and benefited financially from the relationship. The complaint invoked the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the territory's Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the Virgin Islands consumer-protection statute, and the territory later sought 190 million dollars from the bank. The case settled in September 2023, with JPMorgan paying 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands and 290 million dollars to Epstein's victims.[^1][^6] + +Governor Bryan fired George on December 31, 2022, four days after the JPMorgan filing and roughly four weeks after the estate settlement closed. Bryan said the firing was unrelated to the suit, but acknowledged that George had filed the action against the largest U.S. bank without first informing him, and stated that he could not have an attorney general launching lawsuits he did not know about. Bloomberg's disclosure of the filing preceded the dismissal. Bryan appointed the assistant attorney general Carol Thomas-Jacobs to serve in the role on an acting basis.[^2][^7] + +George later said she felt pressure to resolve the matters quickly and to avoid being part of a cover-up, telling Fortune in November 2023 that her bar license and her integrity were more important to her than the position, and that she would lose her job rather than be part of a conspiracy to conceal anything. The timing of the firing relative to the JPMorgan suit was raised again when the Justice Department's later Epstein file releases renewed attention on her account that she had felt threatened during the litigation.[^1][^8] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "Attorney general going after Jeffrey Epstein's estate says she was fired for her dogged pursuit." *Fortune,* November 17, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/11/17/jeffrey-epstein-us-virgin-islands-jpmorgan-attorney-general-investigation-fired/ +[^2]: "Virgin Islands prosecutor fired after accusing JPMorgan of aiding Epstein's sex trafficking ring." *The Washington Times,* January 3, 2023. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jan/3/virgin-islands-prosecutor-fired-after-accusing-jpm/ +[^3]: Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, No. ST-20-CV-14 (V.I. Super. Ct., filed January 15, 2020), brought under the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 14 V.I.C. sections 600 to 614. +[^4]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate of Jeffrey Epstein and Co-Defendants for Over $105 Million." *Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice,* December 1, 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/ +[^5]: "Financier and MoMA Trustee Leon Black Agrees to Pay $62.5 Million to Settle Jeffrey Epstein-Related Claims in the Virgin Islands." *Artnet News,* 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leon-black-62-million-settlement-with-virgin-islands-epstein-claims-2341599 +[^6]: "US Virgin Islands sue JPMorgan Chase over handling of Jeffrey Epstein accounts." *JURIST,* December 30, 2022. https://www.jurist.org/news/2022/12/us-virgin-islands-sue-jp-morgan-over-handling-of-jeffery-epstein-accounts/ ; Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y. 2022). +[^7]: "USVI Attorney General Denise N. George fired." *Virgin Islands News Online,* January 2023. https://www.virginislandsnewsonline.com/en/news/usvi-attorney-general-denise-n-george-fired/ +[^8]: "DOJ Epstein File Dump Revives Former USVI AG's Claim She Felt Threatened After Suing Epstein's Estate." *Los Angeles Magazine,* 2025. https://lamag.com/crimeinla/doj-epstein-file-dump-revives-former-usvi-ags-claim-she-felt-threatened-after-suing-epsteins-estate/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ehud Barak.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ehud Barak.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5644dfd3 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ehud Barak.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +category: "Intelligence & Government" +tags: + - Person + - EhudBarak + - Israel + - IDF + - JeffreyEpstein + - Palantir + - Carbyne + - Intelligence +alias: + - Ehud Barak +summary: "Ehud Barak is an Israeli former prime minister, defense minister, and military intelligence chief whose documented years-long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein included Epstein brokering an introduction to Peter Thiel over Palantir, an April 2014 email proposing a Thiel meeting, and a 2015 arrangement through which Epstein quietly invested approximately one million dollars in the Israeli surveillance-tech startup Carbyne." +born: 1942-02-12 +location: "Mishmar HaSharon, Mandatory Palestine (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Ehud Barak (born Ehud Brog, February 12, 1942, at [[Mishmar HaSharon|Mishmar HaSharon]], [[Mandatory Palestine]]) is an Israeli military and political leader who served as the fourteenth [[Prime Minister of Israel]] (1999-2001), [[Minister of Defense]] (2007-2013), and chief of the General Staff of the [[Israel Defense Forces]] (1991-1995). Barak's career spans the command of the [[Sayeret Matkal|Sayeret Matkal]] special forces unit (including the documented [[Operation Spring of Youth|1973 Spring of Youth]] operation), the military intelligence directorate ([[Aman|Aman]]), the IDF chief-of-staff tenure, the prime ministership, and the defense ministry under [[Ehud Olmert|Ehud Olmert]] and [[Benjamin Netanyahu|Benjamin Netanyahu]]. Barak's documented relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] ran from the early 2000s through 2016 and included Epstein brokering an introduction to [[Peter Thiel]] over [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]] and an arrangement through which Epstein quietly invested approximately one million dollars in the Israeli surveillance-tech startup [[Carbyne|Carbyne]] in 2015.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Sayeret Matkal, Aman, and IDF Command Career + +Barak's military career established his intelligence-community standing. He was commissioned into the Sayeret Matkal general-staff reconnaissance unit in the 1960s and commanded the unit through the operations of the 1970s, including [[Operation Isotope|Operation Isotope]] (the 1972 [[Sabena Airlines|Sabena Flight 571]] rescue) and Operation Spring of Youth (the 1973 [[Beirut|Beirut]] operation targeting the [[Black September|Black September]] leadership, in which Barak led the ground team disguised as a woman). Barak rose to head the military intelligence directorate (Aman) and then served as chief of the General Staff of the IDF from 1991 to 1995, covering the [[Oslo Accords|Oslo Accords]] period and the [[Yitzhak Rabin|Rabin]] assassination aftermath.[^1] + +The intelligence-community background underlies the subsequent Epstein and Thiel relationships. Barak's Aman tenure and his Sayeret Matkal command placed him at the center of the Israeli intelligence network, and his post-military and post-political career maintained the relationships with the Israeli intelligence and defense-technology sectors that Epstein and Thiel's pitches engaged.[^1] + +### The Prime Ministership and the Political Career + +Barak entered politics after the military career and served as Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. His tenure covered the [[2000 Camp David Summit|2000 Camp David Summit]] with [[Yasser Arafat|Yasser Arafat]] and [[Bill Clinton|Bill Clinton]], at which Barak offered concessions on [[Jerusalem|Jerusalem]] and the [[West Bank|West Bank]] that Arafat rejected, leading to the collapse of the Oslo process. The summit's failure was followed by the outbreak of the [[Second Intifada|Second Intifada]] in September 2000, which ended the negotiated-track framework for Israeli-Palestinian relations.[^1] + +In May 2000, Barak ordered the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern [[Lebanon|Lebanon]], ending the 22-year occupation that had begun under [[Menachem Begin|Menachem Begin]] in 1978. The withdrawal was completed rapidly and produced the documented assessment among Israeli security analysts that the retreat under fire had emboldened [[Hezbollah|Hezbollah]] and established the precedent that armed resistance could force Israeli territorial withdrawals. Barak lost the February 2001 special election to [[Ariel Sharon|Ariel Sharon]] and went into political opposition and the private sector.[^1] + +Barak returned as defense minister under Ehud Olmert from 2007 and continued in the role under Netanyahu through 2013. The defense-ministry tenure covered [[Operation Cast Lead|Operation Cast Lead]] (the 2008-09 Gaza war), the documented expansion of Israel's cyber-intelligence capabilities in the 2010s, the [[Stuxnet|Stuxnet]] operation against Iranian nuclear facilities (attributed to a joint U.S.-Israeli effort), and the broader growth of the Israeli surveillance-technology export sector documented on the [[NSO Group|NSO Group]] and Carbyne pages.[^1] + +### The Epstein Relationship and the Introduction + +[[Shimon Peres|Shimon Peres]] introduced Barak to Epstein in 2002, and the relationship continued through 2016. Barak was photographed entering the Epstein Manhattan residence on multiple occasions, and the [[Epstein Files|Epstein calendars]] document the recurring meetings. The Jacobin reporting (March 2026) and the [[Reason|Reason]] piece on Epstein's spy-industry connections (August 2025) document the substantive content: Epstein attempted to broker an introduction between Barak and Peter Thiel over Palantir, and an April 2014 Epstein email to Barak (documented in the the Epstein Files Transparency Act releases releases) reads "I have Peter Thiel on the 19th in NY, if you like." A DOJ-released audio recording surfaced in which Epstein suggests to Barak that he reach out to Thiel.[^2][^3][^4] + +Barak subsequently described Thiel and Epstein as "owners" of a venture fund, a claim a Thiel spokesman has denied. The discrepancy is unresolved in the public record. Thiel is named over 2,200 times in the Epstein files per Al Jazeera reporting, and the volume of the Thiel-Epstein correspondence, combined with the Barak introduction, documents a sustained effort by Epstein to connect the Israeli-intelligence principal (Barak) with the commercial-surveillance-infrastructure principal (Thiel/Palantir). Epstein's promotional framing of Palantir to Barak ran alongside Barak's own subsequent relationships with Israeli surveillance-tech firms.[^2][^3] + +### The Carbyne Investment + +In 2015, Barak helped Epstein quietly invest approximately one million dollars in the Israeli police and emergency-response technology startup [[Reporty|Reporty]], which subsequently renamed itself Carbyne. The investment was arranged through Barak, and [[Forbes|Forbes]] reported that it could have grown to be worth up to one hundred million dollars. Carbyne develops 911-emergency-communication and surveillance technology, including systems that integrate smartphone location, video, and incident data into emergency-response platforms. The technology has documented surveillance applications beyond the emergency-response function, and the Reason reporting characterizes the Carbyne investment as part of Epstein's broader effort to enter the surveillance-technology industry in the post-2008-conviction period.[^2][^5] + +Through the Carbyne investment, Epstein moved from social-network brokerage to direct commercial investment in surveillance technology, and Barak was the channel through which the investment was arranged. The Reason reporting documents that Epstein and Barak marketed Israeli surveillance technology internationally, including to [[Nigeria]], with technology that had reportedly been tested on Palestinians. The international marketing extended the Barak-Epstein surveillance-tech relationship into the documented export context.[^2][^5] + +### The Palantir-Israel Expansion + +Palantir subsequently became a significant technology partner in Israel's military and intelligence efforts. The documented Jacobin reporting (March 2026) traces the Epstein-Barak-Thiel triangle to the subsequent Israeli procurement of Palantir platforms, though the causal chain from the 2014 introduction to the procurement outcome is not documented in primary form. The Israeli intelligence and defense-technology sector's documented adoption of Palantir data-fusion platforms, and the broader Thiel-network interest in the Israeli cyber-intelligence sector (including the [[Unit 8200|Unit 8200]] alumni network that staffs much of the Israeli cyber-security industry), is the commercial-institutional context in which the Epstein-brokered introduction is situated.[^3] + +The parapolitical question of whether the 2014 Epstein-brokered Barak-Thiel introduction was the originating channel for the subsequent Palantir-Israel relationship is not documented in the primary sources currently available. What is documented is that Epstein repeatedly and specifically pitched Palantir to Barak over the 2014-2016 period, that Barak and Thiel were connected through the introduction, and that Palantir subsequently expanded its Israeli-government business. The intermediate steps remain an open thread.[^2][^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Barak's military and political career, see the official Israeli government records and the contemporaneous biographical coverage of the Sayeret Matkal command, the Aman tenure, the IDF chief-of-staff period, the prime ministership, and the defense-ministry tenures. +[^2]: "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's spy industry connections." *Reason,* August 27, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/08/27/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-spy-industry-connections/ +[^3]: "Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein Had a Yearslong Relationship." *Jacobin,* March 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/03/thiel-epstein-barak-ai-israel +[^4]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, "Ehud Barak," cross-referencing the EFTA releases including the April 2014 email. https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/ehud-barak.html +[^5]: "Former Israeli Politician Helped Epstein Quietly Invest $1 Million In [Carbyne]." *Forbes,* 2020. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Felix Bauckholt.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Felix Bauckholt.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..eedc55da --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Felix Bauckholt.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Extremism & Violent Networks" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Rationalism + - QuantitativeFinance + - Violence +alias: + - Ophelia Bauckholt +summary: "Felix 'Ophelia' Bauckholt was a German national and elite quantitative trader, a former informatics-olympiad gold medalist and Tower Research Capital trader, who became part of the Zizian group and was shot dead in the January 2025 Vermont shootout that killed Border Patrol agent David Maland." +died: 2025-01-20 +location: "Jersey City, New Jersey" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Felix Bauckholt, who used the name "Ophelia," was a German national and quantitative trader who became part of the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group and was killed in the January 20, 2025 shootout in [[Coventry]], [[Vermont]], in which U.S. Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]] also died. Bauckholt's trajectory from elite mathematics competition to a half-million-dollar Wall Street trading job to a fatal roadside gunfight made the case one of the most widely reported entries into the [[Rationalist Community]]-adjacent cult.[^1][^2] + +### Mathematics and Trading Career + +Bauckholt represented Germany at the [[International Olympiad in Informatics]], a high-school programming competition, winning a gold medal in 2014 and a bronze in 2015, then left Germany on a scholarship to study pure mathematics at the [[University of Waterloo]] in Canada, graduating in 2019. While still in college Bauckholt interned at [[Jane Street Capital]], an elite quantitative trading firm in New York, and after graduating with honors took a job as a quantitative trader at [[Tower Research Capital]]. By early 2023 Bauckholt was earning more than half a million dollars a year and living in [[Jersey City]], [[New Jersey]], on an H-1B visa.[^1][^3] + +The Tower Research role sat at the high end of the quantitative-trading market that the Olympiad and Waterloo pipeline feeds, where firms recruit competition medalists directly into algorithmic trading. The H-1B status tied Bauckholt's lawful presence in the United States to that employment, so the eventual drift away from Wall Street and into the LaSota network also loosened the immigration footing that the job had supplied. Colleagues recalled an exceptional technical mind, and the contrast between the trajectory and the roadside death in Vermont became the hook for much of the early coverage.[^1][^2] + +### The Zizian Network and Death + +Bauckholt's Jersey City apartment became a gathering place for a circle of friends, most of them highly educated transgender women who shared a preoccupation with the dangers of artificial intelligence, the same network that formed around [[Jack LaSota]]. By mid-2023 Bauckholt had rented half a duplex in Chapel Hill, [[North Carolina]], and [[Teresa Youngblut]] later took a place nearby, putting the two in the same East Coast cluster of members in the months before the shooting. The firearms the pair carried into Vermont had been bought by [[Michelle Zajko]], the person of interest in the Pennsylvania killing of her parents, according to prosecutors.[^2][^4][^5] + +On January 20, 2025, Bauckholt was traveling with Youngblut when Border Patrol agents stopped their vehicle on Interstate 91 in Coventry near the Canadian border. The stop followed several days of surveillance prompted by a Lyndonville hotel employee who reported the pair around January 14 for wearing all-black tactical gear and a holstered firearm. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut fired first with a .40-caliber Glock 23 and Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before agents shot and killed Bauckholt; Maland died of his wounds and Youngblut was wounded and later charged with his murder. A search of the vehicle recovered multiple firearms, hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, and handheld radios.[^4][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Felix Bauckholt: The quant trader on an H1B visa killed by border police," *eFinancialCareers,* 2025. https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/felix-bauckholt +[^2]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309 +[^3]: "Suspect shot and killed in Vermont Border Patrol encounter was German national math/computer whiz," *Vermont Daily Chronicle,* January 23, 2025. https://vermontdailychronicle.com/suspect-shot-and-killed-in-vermont-border-patrol-encounter-was-german-national-math-computer-whiz-source/ +[^4]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025; on the Chapel Hill duplex, the marriage license, and the timeline of the East Coast cluster. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^5]: "Woman charged in killing of Border Patrol agent was in contact with Pennsylvania homicide suspect: prosecutors," CBS News Philadelphia, 2025, on the firearms purchased by Michelle Zajko. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/teresa-youngblut-david-maland-pennsylvania-suspect/ +[^6]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville surveillance, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Francis Galton.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Francis Galton.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..307cacf3 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Francis Galton.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - Eugenics + - Statistics + - Biometrics + - HumanBiodiversity + - Hereditarianism +alias: + - Francis Galton + - Sir Francis Galton +summary: "Francis Galton was the Victorian polymath and half-cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the words eugenics and nature versus nurture, founded biometrics and the statistical concepts of correlation and regression to the mean, pioneered fingerprint identification and composite photography, and endowed the chair of eugenics at University College London." +born: 1822-02-16 +died: 1911-01-17 +location: "Birmingham, England; London, England" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Francis Galton (February 16, 1822 to January 17, 1911) was an English polymath who founded the [[Eugenics|eugenics]] movement, coining the word "eugenics" in 1883, and who in the course of arguing that human ability is inherited created much of modern statistics, including the concepts of correlation and regression. He was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, sharing the grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and read Darwin's *On the Origin of Species* (1859) as a license to extend natural selection to the deliberate breeding of human beings. He pioneered fingerprint identification, composite photography, and anthropometric testing, founded the field of biometrics, introduced the phrase "nature versus nurture," and on his death left his estate to the University of London to endow a professorship of eugenics. He was knighted in 1909.[^1][^2] + +### Hereditary Genius and the Hereditarian Program + +Galton's central conviction, that mental and moral capacity is fixed by heredity rather than shaped by circumstance, was set out in *Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences* (1869). The book tabulated the relatives of judges, statesmen, scientists, poets, and other eminent men, found that distinction clustered in families, and concluded that "genius," meaning exceptionally high and inborn ability, ran in bloodlines the way physical traits did. Galton dismissed the rival explanation, that eminent families pass on advantages of wealth, education, and connection, and treated the statistical clustering of achievement as direct evidence of inherited mental power. He drew the policy inference openly, proposing that the human stock could be improved by encouraging the able to marry early and reproduce.[^2][^3] + +In *English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture* (1874) Galton introduced the antithesis "nature versus nurture" as a compact label for the question of whether inborn endowment or upbringing accounts for human differences, and he leaned consistently toward nature. He developed the twin study as a method for separating the two influences, comparing pairs raised together and apart, and read the results as confirmation of heredity's dominance. The same hereditarian premise, that differences in ability are innate, was shared by the twentieth-century [[Human Biodiversity|race-and-intelligence]] researchers funded by the [[Pioneer Fund]].[^2][^4] + +### Coining Eugenics + +Galton coined "eugenics" in *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development* (1883), building the word from the Greek roots meaning "good in birth" or "well born." He defined it as the science of improving human hereditary qualities through selective reproduction, encouraging the propagation of the "fit" (positive eugenics) and discouraging that of the "unfit" (negative eugenics). The 1883 volume gathered some forty essays on the measurement of human faculties, including mental imagery, association, and sensory acuity, and presented the new science as the practical application of his hereditarian findings.[^1][^5] + +Galton promoted eugenics as a secular faith for the educated classes, writing that it should be introduced into the national conscience "like a new religion." He funded a research office at University College London that in 1904 became the Eugenics Record Office and in 1907 was renamed the Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics, and he served as honorary president of the Eugenics Education Society founded in 1907. His program supplied the template for the eugenics movements that spread through Britain, the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia in the first decades of the twentieth century, including compulsory sterilization laws and, later, the racial policies of the Third Reich.[^5][^6] + +### Statistics, Biometrics, and Identification + +The attempt to prove heredity statistically led Galton to invent tools that outlasted the cause they served. Studying the relationship between the heights of parents and their adult children, he found that the offspring of unusually tall or short parents tended to fall closer to the population average, a phenomenon he first called "reversion" and then "regression toward mediocrity," now known as regression to the mean. From the same data he developed the concept of correlation, a numerical measure of the degree to which two variables move together, which his protégé [[Karl Pearson]] formalized as the correlation coefficient. Galton set out this work in *Natural Inheritance* (1889), the founding text of biometrics, the statistical study of biological variation.[^2][^7] + +Galton opened an Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London in 1884, where for a small fee visitors had their height, weight, reaction time, grip strength, and sensory acuity measured and recorded, building a database of human variation. He placed fingerprint identification on a scientific footing in *Finger Prints* (1892), establishing that the ridge patterns are unique to each person and persist unchanged through life, devising a classification system, and amassing a collection that ran into the thousands of sets. He also invented composite photography, superimposing multiple portraits on a single plate to produce an averaged "type," a technique he applied in an effort to capture the supposed common features of criminals, the ill, and ethnic and family groups.[^4][^8] + +### The Galton Bequest and University College London + +Galton died in 1911 and left the residue of his estate to the University of London to fund a professorship of eugenics, expressing the wish that Pearson hold the first chair. The wish was honored, and Pearson became the inaugural Galton Professor, directing the combined Galton Laboratory and Biometric Laboratory at University College London. The Galton Chair and the laboratory carried his name for more than a century, and the eugenic research conducted under them shaped British social policy and the international eugenics movement through the interwar period.[^6][^9] + +University College London renamed the Galton Lecture Theatre and the Pearson Building and removed Galton's name from its buildings and a professorship in 2020, following an internal inquiry into the institution's history of eugenics, while the Galton Institute, the successor to the Eugenics Education Society, renamed itself the Adelphi Genetics Forum the same year. The bequest had by then funded generations of work in human genetics and statistics at the college, the discipline of biometrics having grown directly out of the apparatus Galton built to demonstrate that ability is bred rather than made.[^6][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Francis Galton," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on his life, the coinage of "eugenics" in 1883, his statistical work, and his knighthood. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Galton +[^2]: Gillham, Nicholas Wright. "Cousins: Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton and the birth of eugenics," *Significance,* Royal Statistical Society, 2009, on Galton as Darwin's half-cousin through Erasmus Darwin, his hereditarianism, and his statistics. https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00379.x +[^3]: Galton, Francis. *Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences.* Macmillan, 1869. +[^4]: Galton, Francis. *English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture.* Macmillan, 1874, on "nature versus nurture" and the twin-study method; with the Anthropometric Laboratory and composite photography per galton.org. +[^5]: Galton, Francis. *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.* Macmillan, 1883, on the coinage and definition of "eugenics." +[^6]: "History of Eugenics Inside UCL," University College London, on the Eugenics Record Office, the Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics, the Galton bequest and chair, and the 2020 renamings. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prejudice-in-power/digital-showcase/history-eugenics-inside-ucl +[^7]: Galton, Francis. *Natural Inheritance.* Macmillan, 1889, on regression toward the mean and correlation. +[^8]: Galton, Francis. *Finger Prints.* Macmillan, 1892, on the uniqueness and permanence of fingerprint patterns and his classification system. +[^9]: "Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College, London," *Nature,* on the bequest and Karl Pearson as first Galton Professor; with University College London's 2020 review of its eugenics history. https://www.nature.com/articles/155197c0 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Gregory Bateson.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Gregory Bateson.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..473fef5c --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Gregory Bateson.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - GregoryBateson + - Anthropology + - Cybernetics + - SystemsTheory + - DoubleBind + - HumanPotentialMovement +alias: + - Gregory Bateson +summary: "Gregory Bateson was the English anthropologist and systems thinker who studied Balinese and Iatmul culture, helped found cybernetics at the Macy Conferences, formulated the double-bind theory of schizophrenia, and spent his last years at the Esalen Institute." +born: 1904-05-09 +died: 1980-07-04 +location: "Grantchester, England; Big Sur and San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Gregory Bateson (May 9, 1904 to July 4, 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, and systems theorist whose work crossed anthropology, psychiatry, biology, and communication theory. The youngest son of the Cambridge geneticist William Bateson, who had coined the word "genetics," he was born in Grantchester, near Cambridge, and educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge, taking a degree in biology in 1925 before turning to anthropology. He conducted fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali, was married to the anthropologist [[Margaret Mead]], was one of the core participants in the [[Macy Conferences]] that founded [[Cybernetics|cybernetics]], formulated the double-bind theory of schizophrenia, spent his last years at the [[Esalen Institute]], and collected his essays in *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (1972) and *Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity* (1979). He died at the San Francisco Zen Center on July 4, 1980.[^1][^2] + +### Naven and the Iatmul + +Between 1929 and 1933 Bateson carried out fieldwork in the Sepik River region of the Territory of New Guinea among the Iatmul people, focusing on the naven, an elaborate ceremony in which relatives enacted ritualized role reversals and transvestism to mark a young person's first accomplishments. He published his analysis as *Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View* in 1936. The book was an unconventional and reflexive study that examined the same body of ritual through ethos, eidos, and social structure and questioned the act of ethnographic description itself.[^1][^3] + +In *Naven* Bateson introduced the concept of schismogenesis, the process by which interaction between individuals or groups becomes progressively differentiated through cumulative feedback, which he divided into symmetrical schismogenesis, where each side escalates the same behavior such as boasting or rivalry, and complementary schismogenesis, where the behaviors are opposed and mutually reinforcing such as dominance and submission. The idea of self-reinforcing cycles of interaction anticipated the feedback concepts he would later take up in cybernetics and apply to family systems.[^3][^4] + +### Bali and Margaret Mead + +Bateson married Margaret Mead in 1936, and from 1936 to 1939 the two conducted joint fieldwork in Bali, pioneering the systematic use of still photography and film as primary ethnographic data rather than illustration. They took some twenty-five thousand photographs and produced *Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis* (1942), in which images were arranged in sequenced plates to convey patterns of child-rearing, posture, trance, and emotional life that prose alone could not capture. The collaboration also yielded a series of ethnographic films including *Trance and Dance in Bali*.[^1][^5] + +Bateson and Mead had one daughter, the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, born in 1939. The couple separated in the 1940s and divorced in 1950, but their intellectual partnership shaped both careers, and Mead drew Bateson into the wartime and postwar American scientific circles, including the group around the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, in which the new science of feedback and communication was being assembled.[^2][^5] + +### The Macy Conferences and Cybernetics + +Bateson was one of the core members of the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the series of interdisciplinary meetings held in New York from 1946 to 1953 under the chairmanship of [[Warren McCulloch]] that brought together [[Norbert Wiener]], [[John von Neumann]], [[Claude Shannon]], Mead, Heinz von Foerster, and others to build a general theory of control and communication in animals and machines. Bateson and Mead were the conferences' principal anthropologists, and Bateson became one of the most active in pressing the group to apply concepts of feedback, information, and circular causality to human relationships, learning, and culture.[^6][^2] + +The cybernetic framework reoriented Bateson's thinking for the rest of his career. He came to treat mind not as a thing located inside a skull but as a pattern of relationships and information distributed across a system of differences, an idea he summarized in the formulation that information is "a difference which makes a difference." Feedback, recursion, and the logical typing of messages drawn from the Macy discussions became the conceptual tools he carried into his study of communication, psychiatry, and evolution.[^6][^7] + +### The Double-Bind Theory + +After the Second World War Bateson moved to California and drifted out of mainstream anthropology into the study of communication and psychiatry. Working at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, he led a research project with Jay Haley, John Weakland, and the psychiatrist Don D. Jackson that produced the paper "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," published in *Behavioral Science* in 1956. The paper advanced the double-bind theory, which held that schizophrenic symptoms could arise within patterns of family communication in which a person repeatedly receives contradictory messages on different logical levels and is unable to comment on the contradiction or to escape the relationship.[^8][^9] + +In the classic double bind a primary injunction conflicts with a secondary injunction at a higher level of abstraction, often verbal warmth contradicted by nonverbal hostility, while a third, tertiary injunction prevents the victim from leaving the field or naming the trap. Bateson framed the theory in terms of [[Bertrand Russell]]'s theory of logical types, treating the pathology as a disorder of the capacity to discriminate the levels of a message rather than as a purely biochemical disease. The double-bind work made Bateson a major figure in the development of family therapy and the systemic schools of psychotherapy that grew out of the Palo Alto group.[^8][^9] + +### Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature + +*Steps to an Ecology of Mind*, published in 1972, collected three decades of Bateson's essays and lectures across anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, epistemology, and what he called the ecology of mind, and it brought his thinking to the wide countercultural audience that had begun reading him in the late 1960s. The volume gathered the schismogenesis work, the double-bind papers, his writing on play, learning, and communication among animals, and his arguments about the cybernetic structure of mind, presenting them as steps toward a unified science of pattern and relationship.[^7][^10] + +In *Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity* (1979) Bateson attempted a synthesis of the ideas, arguing that the same formal patterns of organization, what he called the pattern which connects, run through biological evolution and through mental process, and that mind and living nature obey a common logic of difference, coding, and recursive structure. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 1978 and worked on the book and its unfinished sequel, *Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred*, completed after his death by Mary Catherine Bateson, during his final years.[^7][^11] + +### The Esalen Years + +Bateson became a scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur from 1978 until his death in 1980, lecturing, leading seminars, and living on the property while he worked on *Mind and Nature*. He had been a presence in the institute's intellectual life for years, and his cybernetic conception of mind and his ecological epistemology became part of the framework of the Human Potential movement that had grown up around [[Michael Murphy]] and Dick Price. His writings were also taken up by [[Stewart Brand]], who excerpted Bateson in the [[Whole Earth Catalog]] and the *CoEvolution Quarterly* and helped carry the ecology-of-mind idea into the San Francisco Bay Area technology culture.[^11][^12] + +Bateson held an appointment as a Regents lecturer and later a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, to which Governor Jerry Brown appointed him in 1976. He died on July 4, 1980, at the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center at the age of seventy-six.[^1][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Gregory Bateson," New World Encyclopedia, on his birth on May 9, 1904 in Grantchester, his father William Bateson the geneticist, education at Charterhouse and St John's College Cambridge, the New Guinea fieldwork and *Naven*, the Bali fieldwork with Margaret Mead and *Balinese Character*, schismogenesis, the Macy Conferences, the 1956 double-bind paper, *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* and *Mind and Nature*, and his death on July 4, 1980. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gregory_Bateson +[^2]: Lipset, David. *Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist.* Prentice-Hall, 1980, on his life, his marriage to and divorce from Margaret Mead, and his role in the Macy Conferences. +[^3]: Bateson, Gregory. *Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View.* Cambridge University Press, 1936, on the Iatmul naven ceremony and schismogenesis. +[^4]: "Gregory Bateson," AnthroBase Dictionary of Anthropology, on symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis. http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/pers/bateson_gregory.htm +[^5]: Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. *Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis.* New York Academy of Sciences, 1942, on the 1936 to 1939 Bali fieldwork, the photographic method, and *Trance and Dance in Bali*. +[^6]: Heims, Steve J. *The Cybernetics Group.* MIT Press, 1991, on Bateson and Mead as the anthropologists of the Macy Conferences, 1946 to 1953, and Bateson's application of feedback and information to human relationships. +[^7]: Bateson, Gregory. *Steps to an Ecology of Mind.* Chandler, 1972, on the ecology of mind, "a difference which makes a difference," and the collected essays; and *Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.* Dutton, 1979, on the pattern which connects. +[^8]: Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia." *Behavioral Science,* vol. 1, 1956, pp. 251 to 264, on the double-bind theory. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bs.3830010402 +[^9]: "Bateson Project," on the Palo Alto research group at the Veterans Administration hospital, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Don Jackson, and the logical-types framing of the double bind. +[^10]: "Gregory Bateson," Encyclopaedia Britannica, on the collection of his 1950s and 1960s articles in *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* and his influence on the California counterculture. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gregory-Bateson +[^11]: "Gregory Bateson and Esalen," Enacting Ecological Aesthetics, on the 1978 cancer diagnosis, the scholar-in-residence period at Esalen from 1978 to 1980, the work on *Mind and Nature* and *Angels Fear*, and his death at the San Francisco Zen Center. https://www.enactingecologicalaesthetics.com/gregory-bateson-and-esalen/ +[^12]: Turner, Fred. *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.* University of Chicago Press, 2006, on Brand's publication of Bateson in the *Whole Earth Catalog* and *CoEvolution Quarterly*. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Hal Finney.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Hal Finney.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0cc770a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Hal Finney.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - HalFinney + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - Bitcoin + - Cryonics + - Extropianism +alias: + - Harold Thomas Finney II + - Hal Finney +summary: "Hal Finney was a cryptographer who developed Pretty Good Privacy and reusable proof-of-work, received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, and was cryopreserved by Alcor after his death from ALS." +born: 1956-05-04 +died: 2014-08-28 +location: "Santa Barbara, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Harold Thomas Finney II (1956 to 2014), known as Hal Finney, was an American cryptographer and software developer who worked on [[Pretty Good Privacy]], created the first reusable proof-of-work system, and received the first [[Bitcoin]] transaction sent by [[Satoshi Nakamoto]]. He was a participant in the [[Cypherpunks]] movement and the [[Extropianism|extropian]] community, and on his death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis he was cryopreserved by the [[Alcor Life Extension Foundation]].[^1][^2] + +### Cryptography and PGP + +Finney graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1979 and joined APh Technological Consulting, the firm Mattel contracted to develop the Intellivision, where he programmed the console game Space Battle and its Atari 2600 port Space Attack, as well as Astroblast, the 2600 port of Astrosmash. He began volunteering on [[Phil Zimmermann]]'s Pretty Good Privacy in 1991, became a central contributor to PGP 2.0, and when the federal investigation into Zimmermann closed in 1996 Zimmermann hired him as an employee.[^1][^2][^8] + +Finney ran one of the early anonymous remailers, servers that stripped routing information so that a message could not be traced to its sender, and he was a frequent contributor to the cypherpunks list, where he introduced the idea of digital cash to the overlapping extropian community. He continued working on PGP under Zimmermann until ALS forced his retirement in 2011, by which point PGP had become the standard tool for encrypting email and the federal effort to suppress it had collapsed.[^3][^8] + +### Reusable Proof-of-Work + +Finney announced RPOW on August 15, 2004, a reusable proof-of-work system that took an [[Adam Back]] Hashcash token as input and returned an RSA-signed token that could be handed from person to person and exchanged for a fresh token at each step, so that the same proof of work could circulate while each underlying token was spent only once. He described the result as "as rare and 'valuable' as the hashcash that was used to create them," with no way to inflate the supply.[^3][^4] + +RPOW ran on an IBM 4758 PCI cryptographic coprocessor, a tamper-responding device validated to FIPS 140 Level 4 whose onboard key never left the card and was cleared on any change to the running software. The card issued cryptographically signed attestations of its own software configuration, so users worldwide could verify in real time that the server held no back door and would mint a token only against a token of equal value. RPOW was a direct technical precursor to the proof-of-work scheme that Satoshi Nakamoto later used in Bitcoin, which replaced the trusted hardware with a decentralized blockchain.[^9][^10] + +### Bitcoin + +Finney was among the first people to engage with Bitcoin after Nakamoto released the software. He posted "Running bitcoin" in January 2009, and on 12 January 2009 he received the first Bitcoin transaction sent by Nakamoto, ten coins recorded in block 170, after which he exchanged emails with Nakamoto reporting bugs. In his 2013 forum essay "Bitcoin and me," written after he was largely paralyzed by ALS, Finney recounted his cryptographic career, his early mining of Bitcoin, and that he had moved his coins into an offline wallet so they might be "worth something to my heirs."[^1][^5][^6] + +The speculation that Finney was Satoshi intensified in March 2014 when Leah McGrath Goodman's Newsweek cover story named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City, California, the same town where Finney had lived for about a decade. Andy Greenberg investigated Finney directly for Forbes, commissioning stylometric analysis from Juola and Associates that found his writing the closest match yet to Satoshi's, but the case collapsed against an alibi: at the times Satoshi was sending timestamped emails and confirming a block in April 2009, Finney, an avid runner, was competing in and photographed at a ten-mile road race in Santa Barbara. Greenberg concluded Finney was not Nakamoto, and Finney denied it.[^15][^16] + +### Cryonics and Death + +Finney was a member of the extropian and cryonics communities and had been an Alcor client for twenty years by the time he disclosed his ALS in the October 2009 LessWrong essay "Dying Outside." He was diagnosed in August 2009 and continued programming with a commercial eyetracker and speech synthesizer as the disease left him almost fully paralyzed, writing in 2013 that he could still code, "probably 50 times slower than I was before," and that he "still love[d] programming."[^11][^12] + +Finney died on 28 August 2014 at age fifty-eight in [[Scottsdale]], [[Arizona]], and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, later run by [[Max More]], as its 128th patient on the day of his death. Alcor's case summary records that he chose whole-body preservation, funded by life insurance and bitcoin donated by admirers. In December 2014 an extortionist who had demanded 1,000 bitcoin from the family, worth roughly 400,000 dollars, retaliated for non-payment by placing a false emergency call that sent an armed police team to the Finney home, an attack known as swatting.[^13][^14] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Remembering Hal Finney: A Decade Since His Passing," *Nasdaq,* on his PGP work, the first Bitcoin transaction, RPOW, and his ALS. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/remembering-hal-finney-decade-his-passing-his-legacy-bitcoin-lives +[^2]: "How cryonics and cryptography are related: from Hal Finney to CryoGen," *KrioRus,* on Finney's extropian and cryonics involvement and his Alcor preservation. +[^3]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on Finney introducing digital cash to the extropians and building RPOW. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^4]: Finney, Hal. "RPOW: Reusable Proofs of Work," 2004, on the reusable proof-of-work design. +[^5]: Finney, Hal. "Bitcoin and me," Bitcointalk, 19 March 2013. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 +[^6]: "Hal Finney on Bitcoin: In His Own Words," *CoinDesk,* 29 August 2014, on the first transaction and the Satoshi speculation. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/08/29/hal-finney-on-bitcoin-in-his-own-words +[^7]: "Meet the Cryonics Company Preserving Bitcoin Legend Hal Finney's Body," *Decrypt,* on his Alcor cryopreservation. https://decrypt.co/243997/cryonics-alcor-hal-finney-bitcoin +[^8]: "Hal Finney, cryptographer and bitcoin pioneer, dies," *The Boston Globe,* August 31, 2014, on his Caltech degree, APh and Mattel games, and his 1991 PGP work and hiring by Zimmermann. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2014/08/31/hal-finney-cryptographer-and-bitcoin-pioneer-dies/7aFf8qJ1ixkF98m7QU76RP/story.html +[^9]: Finney, Hal. "RPOW - Reusable Proofs of Work," cryptography mailing list, August 15, 2004. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2004-August/007362.html +[^10]: Finney, Hal. "RPOW - IBM 4758 Security Model," on the FIPS 140 Level 4 coprocessor, the device key, and the real-time attestation of the running software. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/secmodel.html +[^11]: Finney, Hal. "Dying Outside," LessWrong, October 5, 2009, on the ALS diagnosis and his Alcor membership. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outside +[^12]: Finney, Hal. "Bitcoin and me," Bitcointalk, March 19, 2013, on the eyetracker, his slowed coding, and moving coins to an offline wallet. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 +[^13]: "Case Summary A-1436," Alcor Life Extension Foundation, on the August 28, 2014 death in Scottsdale, the whole-body option, and his status as Alcor's 128th patient. https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/complete-list-of-alcor-cryopreservations/case-summary-a-1436/ +[^14]: "Bitcoin Extortionist Targeted Hal Finney and Others," *NewsBTC,* December 30, 2014, on the 1,000-bitcoin demand and the swatting of the Finney home. https://newsbtc.com/2014/12/30/bitcoin-extortionist-targeted-hal-finney-others +[^15]: Goodman, Leah McGrath. "The Face Behind Bitcoin," *Newsweek,* March 6, 2014, naming Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City. https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-247957.html +[^16]: Greenberg, Andy. "Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius," *Forbes,* March 25, 2014, on the Juola stylometric analysis and the road-race alibi clearing Finney. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jack Clark.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jack Clark.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2cef0a15 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jack Clark.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - AIPolicy + - AISafety + - OpenAI +alias: + - Jack Clark +summary: "Jack Clark is the cofounder and head of policy at Anthropic, a former technology journalist who ran policy and communications at OpenAI, co-chairs Stanford's AI Index, and writes the Import AI newsletter." +born: 1987 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jack Clark (born around 1987) is a British technology journalist turned AI executive who cofounded [[Anthropic]] and serves as its head of policy. Before Anthropic he was policy director at [[OpenAI]], and before that a reporter covering computing and artificial intelligence for outlets including *The Register* and Bloomberg. He co-chairs Stanford's AI Index, writes the widely read Import AI newsletter, and has become one of the most visible industry voices in AI governance.[^1][^2] + +### Journalism + +Clark was born in Brighton, England, grew up around London during the early personal-computing era, and studied liberal arts, taking a bachelor's degree centered on English literature and creative writing rather than a technical field, a background he has cited in arguing that the AI era rewards people who can ask the right questions over those who can only code. He entered technology journalism covering enterprise infrastructure, distributed systems, supercomputers, and machine learning. He worked for the British technology publication *The Register*, writing in detail about data centers and emerging neural-network research, before joining Bloomberg as a technology reporter around 2015, where he built a beat on artificial intelligence and was for a period the outlet's dedicated AI reporter.[^2][^3] + +His reporting put him in contact with the research community at the moment deep learning was breaking into the mainstream, and he covered the field as a journalist before deciding to work inside it. He has continued writing in a journalistic mode throughout his industry career through Import AI, a weekly newsletter he began in 2016 that summarizes and analyzes new AI research and is read by tens of thousands of subscribers across the field and in government.[^2][^3] + +### OpenAI + +In 2016 Clark left Bloomberg to join OpenAI, where he ran strategy and communications and rose to become the organization's policy director. In that role he managed the company's public messaging and its engagement with governments, and he was involved in some of OpenAI's early decisions about how to release powerful models, including the staged 2019 rollout of GPT-2 that withheld the full model on stated misuse concerns, an episode that became an early test case in debates over AI release norms.[^1][^4] + +Clark was also a founding member of Stanford's AI Index in 2017, the annual data-driven report on the state of artificial intelligence produced under the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and he has continued as a co-chair of the project. He served on the OECD's expert work on classifying AI systems and, from 2021 to 2024, as an inaugural member of the United States National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, which advises the president on AI policy.[^2][^5] + +### Anthropic and AI Governance + +When [[Dario Amodei]] and a group of senior OpenAI staff resigned over the company's direction in late 2020, Clark left with them and cofounded Anthropic in early 2021, taking responsibility for the company's policy and government-relations work. As head of policy he is Anthropic's chief interlocutor with legislators and regulators, advocating for AI safety testing, transparency requirements, and export controls, and he co-authored Anthropic's submissions to government AI consultations. In March 2026 the company launched the Anthropic Institute, a research arm studying AI's effects on society, which Clark leads.[^1][^6] + +Clark has used Import AI and public appearances to argue that AI capabilities are advancing faster than institutions can absorb, at one point estimating a high probability that AI systems would begin meaningfully contributing to the design of their own successors before the end of the decade, and he has warned against both unconstrained acceleration and a regulatory vacuum. The company he cofounded raised capital at a pace that made its early staff wealthy: after the 2022 [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] investment of roughly 500 million dollars through [[Alameda Research]], Anthropic drew about 8 billion dollars from Amazon and roughly 3 billion from Google, closed a 13-billion-dollar Series F in September 2025 at a 183-billion-dollar valuation, raised further rounds carrying the valuation toward a trillion dollars, and in mid-2026 filed confidentially for an initial public offering after raising well over 100 billion dollars in total; Bloomberg's billionaires index began tracking Clark as a billionaire on the strength of his founder's stake.[^6][^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Jack Clark," *Crunchbase* and contemporaneous profiles, on his cofounding of Anthropic, his head-of-policy role, and his prior OpenAI policy directorship. https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-clark +[^2]: "About," Import AI / jack-clark.net, Clark's own biography, on the journalism career across *The Register* and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the OpenAI policy directorship, the Import AI newsletter, the AI Index founding membership (2017–2024), and the National AI Advisory Committee (2021–2024). https://jack-clark.net/about/ +[^3]: "The billionaire Anthropic cofounder who majored in literature says knowing how to ask the right questions beats knowing how to code," *Fortune,* April 14, 2026, on the Brighton birth, the literature and creative-writing degree, and the journalism background. https://fortune.com/2026/04/14/billionaire-anthropic-cofounder-jack-clark-coding-programming-education-gen-z-unemployment/ +[^4]: "Better Language Models and Their Implications," OpenAI, February 2019, on the staged GPT-2 release decision made during Clark's tenure as policy and communications lead. https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ +[^5]: "Jack Clark," Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, on his co-chairing of the AI Index; "Jack Clark," OECD.AI expert community, on his OECD AI-classification work. https://oecd.ai/en/community/jack-clark +[^6]: "5 Questions for Jack Clark," *Politico,* March 7, 2025, and reporting on the March 2026 launch of the Anthropic Institute that Clark leads. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/03/07/5-questions-for-jack-clark-00218274 +[^7]: "Anthropic raises $13 billion at $183 billion valuation," *CNBC,* September 2, 2025, on the Series F; "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic with another $4 billion," *Reuters,* November 22, 2024, on the roughly 8-billion-dollar Amazon total; and reporting on Google's roughly 3-billion-dollar investment and Anthropic's June 2026 confidential IPO filing after raising more than 100 billion dollars to date. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/anthropic-funding-round-183-billion-valuation.html +[^8]: "Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Jack Clark," on the tracking of Clark's net worth based on his Anthropic founder's stake. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jack-clark/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jean-Luc Brunel.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jean-Luc Brunel.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c084745c --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jean-Luc Brunel.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: [Person, JeanLucBrunel, JeffreyEpstein, MC2ModelManagement, KarinModels, Modeling, SexTrafficking, France] +alias: ["Jean-Luc Brunel"] +summary: "French modeling agent and associate of Jeffrey Epstein, co-founder of MC2 Model Management with reported Epstein funding, who was arrested in France in 2020 on charges including rape of minors and died in a Paris prison in 2022." +born: 1946-09-18 +died: 2022-02-19 +location: Paris, France +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jean-Luc Brunel was a French modeling agent who ran [[Karin Models]] in Paris and later co-founded [[MC2 Model Management]] in New York with reported funding from [[Jeffrey Epstein]]. He was the subject of decades of abuse allegations within the modeling industry, was arrested in France in December 2020 on charges including the rape of minors and human trafficking, and was found hanged in his cell at [[La Santé Prison]] in Paris in February 2022. + +### Modeling Career + +Brunel was born on September 18, 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and worked in restaurant public relations before entering modeling as a scout in the 1970s, acquiring the Paris agency Karin Models from its founder Karin Mossberg and running it by 1978.[^1] He claimed to have launched the careers of models including Monica Bellucci, Sharon Stone and Christy Turlington, and his contemporaries in the Paris and New York agency business included [[John Casablancas]], founder of [[Elite Model Management]], and the agent [[Paolo Zampolli]].[^5] Brunel later restructured Karin Models' U.S. division into a new agency.[^1] + +A 1988 [[60 Minutes]] investigation titled "American Girls in Paris," reported by Diane Sawyer, interviewed nearly two dozen American models who said Brunel and his fellow Paris agent [[Claude Haddad]] had drugged and raped them.[^2] Around the same time the CBS correspondent Craig Pyes spoke with additional models who made similar claims.[^5] The journalist [[Michael Gross]] documented allegations against Brunel in his 1995 book *Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,* quoting industry figures who described him as a predator and said he belonged "behind bars."[^5] Brunel consistently denied wrongdoing, saying he "strongly den[ied] having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing" in his work as a scout and agency manager.[^1] + +### MC2 Model Management + +Around 2004 to 2005 Brunel founded MC2 Model Management, with operations in New York and Miami, building it out of the restructured U.S. division of Karin Models.[^5] Financial records cited in litigation showed Jeffrey Epstein wired about one million dollars to Brunel in connection with the launch, and Epstein provided MC2 a line of credit; some accounts put his total backing closer to two million dollars.[^5] Maritza Vasquez, MC2's former bookkeeper, testified in a 2010 deposition that Epstein had invested roughly one million dollars in the agency.[^5] + +U.S. prosecutors and investigators reported that they believed MC2 functioned as a cover to recruit and supply women and girls for Jeffrey Epstein.[^4] Flight logs placed Brunel on Epstein's aircraft, including a February 2005 flight with the model [[Nadia Marcinkova]], and visitor records reportedly showed Brunel visiting Epstein dozens of times during his 2008 to 2010 Florida incarceration.[^5] Brunel denied these allegations.[^1] + +### Allegations Connected to Jeffrey Epstein + +Multiple women accused Brunel of drugging and sexually assaulting them in Paris during the 1980s and 1990s.[^1] [[Virginia Giuffre]], who accused Jeffrey Epstein of trafficking her, alleged that Brunel sexually abused her and supplied young women and girls to Epstein, stating in sworn accounts that Epstein had directed her to provide sexual services to Brunel.[^3] In a 2015 court filing she said she had "sexual intercourse with Jean-Luc Brunel many times" between the ages of 16 and 19.[^5] + +Giuffre alleged in her filings that Brunel had "many contacts" with young girls and could "get dozens" of them, and she claimed he had an arrangement to obtain passports that allowed him to bring girls "ranging in age from 12 to 24" into the United States.[^5] In one filing she said Epstein had boasted of sleeping with more than 1,000 of Brunel's girls.[^1] U.S. prosecutors and investigators reported that they believed Brunel was used to recruit and supply women and girls for Jeffrey Epstein, and Brunel denied the allegations.[^4] + +### Arrest and Death + +Brunel was detained on December 16, 2020 at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris as he prepared to board a flight to Senegal, part of an investigation French authorities had opened in 2019 after Epstein's death.[^4] He was charged with the rape of minors over 15 and sexual harassment, and was placed under formal investigation in a case encompassing rape and sexual assault of minors under and over 15, sexual harassment, criminal association and human trafficking of minors for the purposes of sexual exploitation.[^6] He was held in pre-trial detention and maintained his innocence.[^3] + +On February 19, 2022 Brunel was found hanged with bedsheets in his cell at La Santé Prison in Paris at around 1:30 a.m.; he was 75.[^3] French authorities treated the death as a suicide, and a medical examiner reported death by hanging.[^6] He died in custody before facing trial, leaving the allegations unadjudicated.[^6] + +The French investigation into the wider network of allegations against Brunel and others connected to Epstein remained open after his death, with French prosecutors continuing to examine the trafficking and abuse claims.[^4] His death, the second of a central Epstein figure to occur in custody and be ruled a suicide after Epstein's own 2019 death, drew renewed scrutiny from lawyers for the alleged victims.[^6] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "Jean-Luc Brunel," summarizing reporting on his career, MC2 Model Management, the Epstein funding, the 1995 Michael Gross book *Model,* and his denials. https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/former-model-agent-close-to-jeffrey-epstein-found-hanged-1235085929/ +[^2]: "American Girls in Paris," *60 Minutes,* CBS, reported by Diane Sawyer, December 1988. https://www.kqed.org/arts/13887034/fashion-is-about-to-have-its-metoo-moment-and-its-long-overdue +[^3]: "Jean-Luc Brunel, Jeffrey Epstein associate accused of rape, supplying girls, found hanged in prison," *Washington Post,* 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/19/jean-luc-brunel-hanged-epstein/ +[^4]: "Modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel arrested in Paris in Epstein probe," *NBC News,* 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/modeling-agent-jean-luc-brunel-arrested-paris-epstein-probe-n1251589 +[^5]: "Jean-Luc Brunel: The French Modeling Honcho at the Center of Jeffrey Epstein's Web," *The Fashion Law,* on Karin Models, the 1988 60 Minutes report and Claude Haddad, the Michael Gross book, the MC2 founding and Epstein funding, Maritza Vasquez's deposition, and Virginia Giuffre's allegations. https://www.thefashionlaw.com/jean-luc-brunel-at-the-center-of-jeffrey-epsteins-web-of-underage-girls/ +[^6]: "Jean-Luc Brunel, French modeling agent and associate of Jeffrey Epstein, found dead in prison cell," *CNN,* 2022, on the charges, the Senegal flight, the suicide ruling and the open investigation. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/europe/jean-luc-brunel-jeffrey-epstein-death-intl diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jeffrey Epstein.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jeffrey Epstein.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ce8542ff --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jeffrey Epstein.md @@ -0,0 +1,141 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - SexOffender + - SexTrafficking + - Intelligence + - Blackmail + - Mossad + - RobertMaxwell + - GhislaineMaxwell + - LesWexner + - SciencePhilanthropy + - DarkMoney +alias: + - Jeffrey Edward Epstein +summary: "Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier and convicted sex offender who ran a sex-trafficking operation alongside Ghislaine Maxwell, cultivated a network spanning technology billionaires, heads of state, intelligence officials, and elite scientists, and whose unexplained wealth, intelligence-adjacent contacts, and 2019 jail death produced sustained questions about whether his operation served blackmail or intelligence functions." +born: 1953-01-20 +died: 2019-08-10 +location: "Brooklyn, New York" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jeffrey Epstein (January 20, 1953 to August 10, 2019) was an American financier and convicted sex offender who, with his companion [[Ghislaine Maxwell]], ran a sex-trafficking operation that recruited and abused dozens of underage girls across his residences in [[Manhattan]], [[Palm Beach, Florida|Palm Beach]], [[New Mexico]], the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], and [[Paris]]. He built a social and financial network that encompassed technology billionaires ([[Peter Thiel]], [[Bill Gates]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Reid Hoffman]], [[Mark Zuckerberg]]), heads of state and politicians ([[Bill Clinton]], [[Ehud Barak]], [[Prince Andrew]], [[Donald Trump]]), intelligence officials ([[William Burns]]), financiers and executives ([[Leslie Wexner]], [[Tom Pritzker]], [[Howard Lutnick]]), and prominent scientists ([[Martin Nowak]], [[Marvin Minsky]], [[George Church]], [[Stephen Hawking]]) brokered through the literary agent [[John Brockman]]. The source of his fortune was never satisfactorily explained, his long association with [[Robert Maxwell|Robert Maxwell's]] daughter raised documented intelligence questions, and his death in federal custody in 2019 was ruled a suicide over disputes that have not been resolved.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Early Life, Dalton, and Bear Stearns + +Epstein was born in [[Brooklyn]], New York, and raised in the Sea Gate and [[Coney Island]] area in a working-class Jewish family; his father worked for the New York City parks department. He attended Lafayette High School, then [[Cooper Union]] and the Courant Institute at [[New York University]], leaving both without a degree. In 1974 he was hired to teach mathematics and physics at the [[Dalton School]], the elite Upper East Side preparatory school, despite having no degree and no teaching credential. The headmaster during the period of his hiring was [[Donald Barr]], the novelist and educator who was the father of the future U.S. Attorney General [[William Barr]], whose Department of Justice would later oversee the federal case and the jail in which Epstein died. Accounts differ on whether Barr personally hired Epstein, since Barr resigned the headmastership in 1974.[^1][^5] + +At Dalton, Epstein cultivated the parents of his students, and a connection there brought him to [[Bear Stearns]], the investment bank then led by [[Alan Greenberg]]. He joined in 1976, worked in the special products division advising wealthy clients on tax strategy, and rose to limited partner before resigning in 1981. The firm and Epstein gave varying accounts of the departure, which has been attributed to a Regulation D securities violation and to an internal inquiry. In 1981 he founded the consulting firm Intercontinental Assets Group, and in 1988 he established [[J. Epstein & Co.]], which he said managed money exclusively for clients worth more than one billion dollars, a claim that obscured rather than explained his finances.[^1][^3] + +### Towers Financial and the Hoffenberg Partnership + +In the late 1980s Epstein worked closely with [[Steven Hoffenberg]], the financier who controlled [[Towers Financial Corporation]], a debt-collection company that bought portfolios of distressed medical and telephone receivables and sold notes and bonds to investors. Epstein was retained as a consultant, reportedly at twenty-five thousand dollars a month, and the two pursued attempted corporate takeovers of [[Pan American World Airways|Pan Am]] and [[Emery Air Freight]] around 1987 and 1988. Towers Financial collapsed in 1993 in what prosecutors described as one of the largest [[Ponzi scheme|Ponzi schemes]] before [[Bernard Madoff]], with roughly 475 million dollars taken from investors. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995, was sentenced to twenty years, and served about eighteen.[^7] + +After his release Hoffenberg publicly claimed that Epstein had been a co-architect of the Towers fraud and had walked away with money while leaving Hoffenberg to face prosecution alone. Epstein was never charged in connection with Towers Financial, and Hoffenberg's reliability was contested; he made his accusations only years later, in litigation and interviews. Hoffenberg was found dead at his home in Derby, [[Connecticut]] in August 2022. The Towers period is one of two documented sources of capital, alongside the Wexner relationship, around which Epstein's later wealth was assembled.[^7] + +### Leslie Wexner and the Source of Wealth + +Leslie Wexner, the founder of [[The Limited]], [[L Brands]], [[Victoria's Secret]], and [[Bath & Body Works]], met Epstein in the mid-1980s and made him his money manager and confidant. In 1991 Wexner granted Epstein sweeping power of attorney, authority to borrow money, sign checks, buy and sell property, and hire and fire on his behalf. Wexner transferred to Epstein the use of, and eventually title to, the seven-story townhouse at [[9 East 71st Street]] in Manhattan, one of the largest private residences in the city, which an Epstein entity took over around 2011 for far below its market value. Wexner also co-founded the [[Mega Group]], a club of wealthy Jewish businessmen and philanthropists, with the [[Seagram]] heir [[Charles Bronfman]].[^3][^6] + +Wexner cut ties with Epstein around 2007, and in 2019 he stated publicly that Epstein had "misappropriated vast sums" from him and his family, an amount reported as more than 46 million dollars, which Wexner said he had recovered. The mechanics of how a single client's fortune translated into Epstein's own remained opaque. A December 2025 [[New York Times]] investigation concluded that Epstein built his apparent wealth through "scams, theft and lies" rather than financial acumen, that his billionaire status was exaggerated, and that the Wexner relationship was central to whatever fortune he actually held.[^3] + +### Ghislaine Maxwell and the Maxwell Intelligence Question + +Ghislaine Maxwell became Epstein's companion, social organizer, and, according to her 2021 federal conviction, the principal recruiter and procurer of his trafficking operation, beginning in the early 1990s after she moved to New York. She is the youngest daughter of Robert Maxwell (born Jan Ludvik Hoch in [[Czechoslovakia]] in 1923), the British publishing magnate who controlled [[Mirror Group Newspapers]], served as a Labour [[Member of Parliament]], looted roughly 460 million pounds from the Mirror Group pension funds, and died in a disputed drowning off his yacht near the [[Canary Islands]] on November 5, 1991. Robert Maxwell was alleged across multiple published accounts to have operated as an intelligence asset, including for [[Mossad]], [[MI6]], and the [[KGB]], with claims involving the distribution of modified [[PROMIS]] software and a role in the [[Mordechai Vanunu]] case.[^2][^20] + +The strongest version of the intelligence claim traces to [[Ari Ben-Menashe]], a self-described former Israeli military intelligence officer, who alleged in his book Profits of War (1992) and later interviews that Robert Maxwell was a longtime Mossad asset and that Epstein and Ghislaine ran a sexual blackmail operation connected to Israeli intelligence. Ben-Menashe's account is uncorroborated by any declassified file, and his reliability is widely disputed. What is documented is narrower: that Ghislaine maintained the transatlantic social access through which Epstein operated, and that Epstein separately cultivated Barak and the Israeli surveillance-technology firm [[Carbyne]]. Whether the operation was directed by any service, or simply weaponized inherited wealth and connections for leverage, is unproven in any primary source and is treated here as a documented analytical thread rather than established fact.[^2][^20] + +### The Properties + +Epstein's residences functioned as the physical infrastructure of the trafficking operation. The Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street, the Palm Beach house at [[358 El Brillo Way]] (acquired in 1990), the roughly 10,000-acre [[Zorro Ranch]] near Stanley, New Mexico, the private island of [[Little St. James]] in the U.S. Virgin Islands (acquired in 1998), the neighboring [[Great St. James]] (acquired in 2016), and an apartment on the [[Avenue Foch]] in Paris formed a circuit across which victims and associates were moved. Victims and a 1996 [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] report by [[Maria Farmer]] described hidden cameras and surveillance equipment in the properties, which fed the later allegation that the residences were instrumented to record guests.[^4][^9] + +Zorro Ranch in New Mexico was, according to a 2019 New York Times report, the site Epstein discussed for a project to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnating many women, a scheme he described to scientists and associates and that never came to fruition. New Mexico reopened a criminal inquiry into the ranch in 2025. Little St. James, called "Pedophile Island" in local accounts, was where Epstein hosted a 2002 science conference and where multiple victims said abuse occurred; under the 2022 settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands the island was sold and half the proceeds paid to the territory.[^9][^15] + +### The Trafficking Operation and the Recruitment Network + +The operation recruited girls, some as young as 14, to give Epstein "massages" that became sexual abuse, and paid victims to recruit additional victims in a pyramid structure. The schemers and recruiters included Ghislaine Maxwell and a circle of assistants and procurers: [[Sarah Kellen]], [[Nadia Marcinkova]], [[Adriana Ross]], and [[Lesley Groff]], the four employees named and granted immunity in the 2008 federal agreement, and the French modeling agent [[Jean-Luc Brunel]], whose [[MC2 Model Management]] agency was reportedly seeded with about one million dollars of Epstein money and supplied women and girls. Brunel was arrested in France in December 2020 on charges including the rape of minors and was found hanged in a Paris prison in February 2022.[^4] + +The Palm Beach Police Department opened an investigation in 2005 after a parent reported that her teenage daughter had been molested, and detectives identified dozens of victims and a network of recruiters. The most prominent victim-witnesses include [[Virginia Giuffre]] (recruited at age 16 or 17 while working at [[Mar-a-Lago]]), Maria Farmer and her sister [[Annie Farmer]], [[Courtney Wild]], and [[Sarah Ransome]]. Their accounts, depositions, and civil suits, many unsealed in the 2024 [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] document release, provided much of the public record of the operation.[^4][^21] + +### The Flight Logs and the Black Book + +Epstein owned a Boeing 727 and additional aircraft flown by the pilots [[Larry Visoski]] and [[David Rodgers]], whose logbooks recorded passengers on flights among New York, Palm Beach, the Virgin Islands, and Europe. The logs surfaced through the civil litigation of 2009 to 2015 and became the basis for much of the public mapping of Epstein's contacts, though a log entry records travel and not conduct. Visoski testified at the 2021 Maxwell trial that he had never witnessed sexual activity aboard the aircraft, and the logs by themselves establish who flew, not what occurred.[^4] + +A bound contact directory, the "little black book," held roughly 1,900 entries of names, telephone numbers, and addresses spanning finance, politics, royalty, science, and entertainment. A former house manager at the Palm Beach property, [[Alfredo Rodriguez]], copied the directory and tried to sell it in 2009, calling it the "holy grail"; he was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2010. Redacted versions of the directory and of the flight manifests later circulated publicly and were cited in reporting and litigation to identify members of Epstein's social circle.[^4][^23] + +The documentary record expanded sharply after Epstein's death. The January 2024 unsealing of the Giuffre v. Maxwell exhibits by Judge Loretta Preska, the staged 2025 Justice Department releases, and the House Oversight Committee productions added emails, calendars, depositions, and photographs to the logs and the directory. The combined record widened the list of documented contacts while leaving intact the distinction between appearing in Epstein's logs or address book and participating in his crimes, a distinction that much of the subsequent public controversy turned on.[^17][^21] + +### The 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement + +The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the [[Southern District of Florida]] investigated Epstein in 2006 and 2007 and prepared a 53-page federal indictment. Instead of prosecuting, the U.S. Attorney [[Alexander Acosta]] negotiated a [[non-prosecution agreement]] in 2007 and 2008 under which Epstein pleaded guilty to two Florida state charges, soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution, was sentenced to 18 months, served about 13 in the Palm Beach County stockade with work-release privileges that let him leave six days a week, and registered as a sex offender. The agreement also granted federal immunity to named co-conspirators and was concealed from the victims.[^4] + +The deal's leniency became the subject of the [[Miami Herald]] series "Perversion of Justice" by the reporter [[Julie K. Brown]] in 2018, which revived the case. In February 2019 the federal judge [[Kenneth Marra]] ruled that prosecutors had violated the [[Crime Victims' Rights Act]] by hiding the agreement from victims. Acosta, who had become U.S. Secretary of Labor under Donald Trump, resigned in July 2019. A 2020 Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility report found that Acosta had exercised "poor judgment" but had not committed professional misconduct.[^4][^19][^21] + +### The Science Network and the Eugenics Ambition + +From the late 1990s Epstein financed and embedded himself in elite science through the literary agent John Brockman and his [[Edge Foundation]], whose annual "billionaires' dinner" Epstein attended and helped underwrite, and through targeted university gifts. He donated roughly 9.1 million dollars to [[Harvard University]] between 2001 and 2007, including about 6.5 million dollars around 2003 to help establish the [[Program for Evolutionary Dynamics]] under the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, who gave Epstein an office and, according to Harvard's May 2020 internal review, key-card access and more than 40 visits after his 2008 conviction. Epstein cultivated scientists including Marvin Minsky of the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], the geneticist George Church, the physicist [[Lawrence Krauss]], and the cognitive scientist [[Steven Pinker]], and funded conferences attended by figures up to Stephen Hawking.[^8][^9] + +Epstein's interest in genetics and population converged with a stated ambition to spread his own DNA. The 2019 New York Times report documented that he told scientists of plans to impregnate women at Zorro Ranch to seed the human race with his genome, and that he was drawn to [[transhumanism]] and [[eugenics]]. After his 2019 arrest, Church apologized for continued contact, and the [[MIT Media Lab]] director [[Joi Ito]] resigned over revelations, reported by Ronan Farrow, that the lab had concealed Epstein's donations. The science network gave Epstein a reputation as a patron of ideas that ran in parallel to his criminal operation.[^8][^9] + +### The Post-Conviction Network + +After the 2008 plea Epstein rebuilt his social and business standing and continued to broker access among the wealthy and powerful. The [[Wall Street Journal]] reporting on his recovered calendars documented post-conviction meetings with William Burns (the future CIA director), [[Noam Chomsky]], the [[Obama]]-administration lawyer [[Kathryn Ruemmler]], and Tom Pritzker. Document releases established the August 2015 dinner hosted by Reid Hoffman in [[Palo Alto]] at which Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Joi Ito were present to raise money for the MIT Media Lab; a February 2016 email recording that Thiel "LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea"; the 2011 Tom Pritzker correspondence using "secret society" language; and 2014 meetings at the townhouse attended by William Burns.[^10][^11][^12] + +The political relationships were older and equally documented. Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's Boeing 727, the so-called [[Lolita Express]], more than two dozen times in the early 2000s, including a 2002 trip to Africa connected to the [[Clinton Foundation]], while denying any knowledge of Epstein's crimes or any visit to Little St. James. Prince Andrew, the [[Duke of York]], was photographed with Virginia Giuffre in 2001, settled her 2021 civil suit for a reported sum in 2022 without admitting liability, and was stripped of his royal and military titles between 2022 and 2025. Donald Trump socialized with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s before a falling out, a relationship documented in flight logs, contemporaneous quotes, and a disputed 2003 birthday letter.[^11][^18] + +### The Intelligence and Blackmail Question + +The recurring claim that Epstein's operation served an intelligence or blackmail function rests on several documented strands and one contested central assertion. The documented strands include Ghislaine Maxwell's intelligence-linked paternity; Epstein's brokering of the Israeli emergency-response and surveillance firm Carbyne and his attempts to connect Ehud Barak with Peter Thiel over [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]]; the instrumentation of his properties with cameras; and the 2019 search of the townhouse, which recovered a safe containing compact discs, cash, diamonds, and an expired foreign passport in Epstein's name with a Saudi address. The contested central assertion is the claim, attributed by the journalist [[Vicky Ward]] to a former senior White House official, that Acosta had told Trump transition vetters he was given to understand Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to leave the case alone.[^11][^19] + +Acosta denied making the statement when questioned by the House Oversight Committee, saying he had no knowledge of whether Epstein was connected to any intelligence service. The "belonged to intelligence" quote traces to a single anonymous source. No declassified document confirms that Epstein worked for any agency of any country. The blackmail thesis (that the recordings and the elite guest lists were assembled to generate leverage) is supported by victim and witness descriptions of surveillance and by the structure of the operation, but it remains an inference rather than a documented program, and is recorded here as an open question rather than an established fact.[^11][^19][^20] + +The earliest known report to law enforcement came in 1996, when Maria Farmer told the FBI that she and her younger sister had been abused and described surveillance equipment inside Epstein's New York residence; she said the report produced no apparent action for years. Accounts from victims and household staff describing cameras in the properties, combined with the 2019 recovery of compact discs and the foreign passport from the townhouse safe, are the documented basis for the inference that the operation was instrumented to generate leverage. No recordings of guests have been produced publicly, no service of any country has acknowledged a relationship with Epstein, and the maximalist accounts that describe a fully operational blackmail enterprise rest on inference and contested sourcing rather than a disclosed program. What the cameras recorded, and where any recordings went, remains unresolved in the public record.[^4][^14][^19] + +### The Financial Structures and the Bank Settlements + +Epstein's finances ran through entities chartered in the U.S. Virgin Islands, including [[Financial Trust Company]] (established in 1996) and [[Southern Trust Company]] (established around 2012), which obtained territorial tax benefits under the Economic Development Commission program. The Virgin Islands later alleged that Southern Trust fraudulently obtained those benefits by claiming to run a "DNA database" and data-mining ("informatics") business it never actually conducted, and that the company existed to fund Epstein's criminal activity and properties. His banking ran through [[JPMorgan Chase]], which kept him as a client until 2013, and then [[Deutsche Bank]].[^15][^16] + +The Virgin Islands operation extended into territorial politics. According to the Attorney General's complaint, Epstein's local affairs were managed by [[Cecile de Jongh]], the office manager of Southern Trust and the wife of Governor [[John de Jongh]] (in office 2007 to 2015), and the complaint alleged that she helped Epstein shape legislation affecting sex-offender monitoring and the Economic Development Commission benefits while Epstein-linked entities paid family expenses. The territory's later Attorney General, [[Denise George]], who filed the 2020 suit against the estate and a 2022 suit against JPMorgan, was removed by Governor [[Albert Bryan]] days after the bank suit was filed. The banks themselves became defendants, with Jes Staley, the JPMorgan executive who managed the Epstein relationship, later banned from senior UK finance roles over it.[^15][^16] + +The post-death litigation produced large settlements. In 2022 Epstein's estate agreed to pay the U.S. Virgin Islands more than 105 million dollars, plus the repayment of roughly 80 million dollars in tax benefits and half the proceeds of Little St. James. In 2023 JPMorgan paid 290 million dollars to victims and 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands, and Deutsche Bank paid 75 million dollars to victims. The former JPMorgan and Barclays executive [[Jes Staley]], who managed the Epstein banking relationship, was fined and permanently banned from senior financial roles by the UK Financial Conduct Authority in 2023 for misleading the regulator about his ties to Epstein; an appeals tribunal upheld the ban in 2025 while reducing the penalty to about 1.1 million pounds. The Epstein Victims' Compensation Program separately paid out roughly 121 million dollars to more than 125 claimants.[^15][^16] + +### The 2019 Federal Charges and the Death + +On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested at [[Teterboro Airport]] in New Jersey as he returned from Paris, charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the [[Southern District of New York]] under [[Geoffrey Berman]] (with the prosecutor [[Maurene Comey]] on the case) with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy. The search of the townhouse recovered the safe and its contents, and a judge ordered him held without bail. On August 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his cell at the [[Metropolitan Correctional Center]] in Manhattan. The New York City Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging.[^1][^14] + +The death produced sustained dispute. The guards [[Tova Noel]] and [[Michael Thomas]] had failed to perform required checks and later admitted to falsifying records; they were charged in November 2019 and entered a deferred-prosecution agreement, and the charges were ultimately dropped. The cameras outside the cell malfunctioned, and Epstein had been removed from suicide watch after an earlier incident. The forensic pathologist [[Michael Baden]], retained by Epstein's brother [[Mark Epstein]], said the fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage were more consistent with homicidal strangulation than hanging, while the Medical Examiner stood by the suicide ruling. A 2023 Justice Department Inspector General report attributed the death to the guards' negligence and the jail's failures and found no evidence of murder, while documenting that the combination of lapses was extraordinary.[^14] + +### The Estate, the Document Releases, and the 2025-2026 Files + +Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in [[New Hampshire]] in July 2020 and convicted in December 2021 on five federal counts including sex trafficking of a minor, and sentenced to 20 years in June 2022. Beginning in January 2024 the Giuffre v. Maxwell documents were unsealed by the judge [[Loretta Preska]], naming associates and contacts across hundreds of pages. Virginia Giuffre died by suicide in Australia in April 2025; her memoir, Nobody's Girl, was published posthumously in 2025.[^21][^22] + +In 2025 the Trump Justice Department under Attorney General [[Pam Bondi]] released files in stages amid controversy over a promised "client list" that was never produced. Congress then passed the [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]] (H.R. 4405) by a nearly unanimous House vote in November 2025, and Trump signed it. The Department released a library reaching roughly 3.5 million pages, more than 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images, and in December 2025 disclosed that more than one million additional documents had been found, missing a statutory deadline and prompting a Government Accountability Office inquiry into redactions made at the request of members of Congress. A separate strand concerned the 2003 "birthday book" assembled for Epstein's 50th birthday, which the Wall Street Journal reported in July 2025 contained a bawdy letter bearing Donald Trump's signature; Trump denied authorship and sued the paper, and the House Oversight Committee released the book in September 2025.[^17][^18] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Timeline of the Life and Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein." *CBS New York,* 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/timeline-of-the-life-and-crimes-of-jeffrey-epstein/ ; "A Young Jeffrey Epstein Made An Impression On His High School Students." *NPR,* July 19, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/19/742725946/a-young-jeffrey-epstein-made-an-impression-on-his-high-school-students +[^2]: "The murky life and death of Robert Maxwell, and how it shaped his daughter Ghislaine." *The Guardian,* August 22, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/22/the-murky-life-and-death-of-robert-maxwell-and-how-it-shaped-his-daughter-ghislaine +[^3]: "The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich." *New York Times,* December 16, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-money-scams-investigation.html +[^4]: Brown, Julie K. "Perversion of Justice." *Miami Herald,* 2018. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html +[^5]: "The 'Epstein-Barr' Problem of New York City's Dalton School." *Law and Crime,* 2019. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/the-epstein-barr-problem-of-new-york-citys-dalton-school/ +[^6]: Ward, Vicky. "The Talented Mr. Epstein." *Vanity Fair,* March 2003. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303 +[^7]: For the Towers Financial Corporation collapse, the 1995 Hoffenberg conviction, and Hoffenberg's later claims about Epstein, see the contemporaneous SEC and federal court record (United States v. Hoffenberg, S.D.N.Y.) and "The Mogul and the Monster" reporting; Hoffenberg's "architect" claim is his own assertion and Epstein was never charged in the matter. +[^8]: Harvard University, "Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein's Connections to Harvard," May 1, 2020. https://www.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Reportconcerning-Jeffrey-Epstein.pdf +[^9]: Stewart, James B., Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. "Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA." *New York Times,* July 31, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html ; "New Investigation Launched into Epstein's Zorro Ranch." *Time,* 2025. https://time.com/7379228/epstein-zorro-ranch-investigation/ +[^10]: For the EFTA primary documents (EFTA01738574, EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564, EFTA02407727), see the Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index. https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^11]: For the recovered Epstein calendars (Burns, Chomsky, Ruemmler, Pritzker meetings), see the *Wall Street Journal* "Jeffrey Epstein's Private Calendar" reporting, May 2023. +[^12]: "Epstein's Silicon Valley ties extended beyond just Musk and Gates." *CNBC,* February 9, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/tech-leaders-epstein-records-silicon-valley-sergey-brin-thiel-sinofsky-reid-hoffman-musk-gates.html +[^14]: "NYC medical examiner rejects claim that Jeffrey Epstein's death was a homicide." *CNN,* October 30, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/us/jeffrey-epstein-autopsy-fox ; "Jeffrey Epstein autopsy finds broken bones in his neck." *CNN,* August 15, 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/15/us/jeffrey-epstein-autopsy-broken-neck ; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, "Investigation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein," June 2023. +[^15]: "U.S. Virgin Islands reaches a $105M settlement with Jeffrey Epstein's estate." *NPR,* December 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140096222/jeffrey-epsteins-estate-reaches-a-105m-settlement-with-the-u-s-virgin-islands ; Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands, "Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate of Jeffrey Epstein," 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/ +[^16]: "JPMorgan settles with Jeffrey Epstein victims for $290 million." *WHYY,* 2023. https://whyy.org/articles/jpmorgan-settlement/ ; "Ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley fined and banned by UK regulator for Epstein ties." *AP/AOL,* 2023. https://www.aol.com/finance/ex-barclays-ceo-jes-staley-142727090.html +[^17]: "New Epstein files include photos, documents with redactions as DOJ releases initial trove of records." *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/epstein-files-released-2025/ ; "DOJ says it has found over a million additional documents potentially related to Epstein." *CNN,* December 24, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/24/politics/epstein-documents-doj-million ; U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Files Transparency Act disclosures. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures +[^18]: "Birthday letter to Epstein bore Trump's signature, drawing of naked woman, Wall Street Journal reports." *CNN,* July 17, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/17/politics/epstein-birthday-letter-trump ; "Trump Epstein letter and drawing from 'birthday book' released." *CNBC,* September 8, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/08/trump-epstein-birthday-book-oversight.html +[^19]: Ward, Vicky. "Jeffrey Epstein's Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight." *The Daily Beast,* July 9, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight/ ; for Acosta's denial, see his September 2019 testimony before the House Oversight Committee. +[^20]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* Sheridan Square Press, 1992. Ben-Menashe's claims that Robert Maxwell was a Mossad asset and that the Maxwell-Epstein link served Israeli intelligence are uncorroborated by declassified material and treated as contested allegation. +[^21]: United States v. Maxwell, 20 Cr. 330 (S.D.N.Y.); for the Crime Victims' Rights Act ruling see Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736 (S.D. Fla. February 21, 2019), Marra, J. +[^22]: "Ghislaine Maxwell Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison." *U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of New York,* June 28, 2022. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prison-conspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually-abuse +[^23]: For the flight logs, the pilots' testimony, and the contact directory, see the trial record in United States v. Maxwell (S.D.N.Y. 2021), the *Miami Herald* "Perversion of Justice" reporting, and the Alfredo Rodriguez obstruction case, United States v. Rodriguez (S.D. Fla. 2010). diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/John Brockman.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/John Brockman.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..75d22957 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/John Brockman.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +category: "Authors & Journalists" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - EdgeFoundation + - SciencePhilanthropy + - LiteraryAgent + - ThirdCulture + - BillionairesDinner +alias: + - John Brockman +summary: "John Brockman is a New York literary agent who founded the Edge Foundation and Edge.org, hosted the annual Billionaires' Dinner, and whose salon was for years substantially funded by Jeffrey Epstein." +born: 1941-02-16 +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author who founded the [[Edge Foundation]] and its website [[Edge.org]], coined the popularized version of the "third culture," and built a science-and-technology client list through his agency Brockman Inc. For years his annual literary salon and its Billionaires' Dinner were substantially financed by [[Jeffrey Epstein]], and foundations associated with Epstein supplied a majority of Edge's revenue over 2001 to 2017.[^1][^2] + +### From the 1960s Art Scene to Brockman Inc. + +Brockman was born in Boston to Austrian Jewish immigrants and raised in the Dorchester neighborhood, taking an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1963. He moved into the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, organizing intermedia and underground-film events and absorbing the ideas of [[Marshall McLuhan]], [[John Cage]], and [[Buckminster Fuller]], whom he later cited as formative influences. He published early experimental books including *By the Late John Brockman* (1969) before turning to literary agenting.[^3][^1] + +Brockman formed the literary agency Brockman Inc. in 1973 as an international agency for serious nonfiction. It became the leading agency in science and technology writing, negotiating large advances for authors including [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Daniel Kahneman]], [[Steven Pinker]], [[Daniel Dennett]], [[Jared Diamond]], [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]], and [[Martin Rees]], a roster that at points included three Nobel laureates. His wife [[Katinka Matson]] co-founded the agency, served as its president, and produced the digital botanical images used across Edge; she is listed as a co-founder of Edge as well.[^3][^9] + +Brockman described the agency and the salon as overlapping enterprises, with many Edge contributors also being agency clients. His son [[Max Brockman]] joined the firm, became its chief executive, and edited the *This Will Make You Smarter* and *What's Next?* anthologies drawn from younger Edge contributors. Among the clients whose Epstein ties later drew scrutiny were Pinker, Dennett, [[Marvin Minsky]], and the [[MIT Media Lab]] director [[Joi Ito]], all of whom appeared on Edge or in Epstein's orbit.[^9][^1] + +### The Reality Club and the Third Culture + +Brockman founded a discussion group he called the Reality Club, which met from 1981 to 1996 in restaurants, lofts, the Rosa Mexicano restaurant, and other venues around New York for seminars by scientists and intellectuals. In 1995 he published *The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution* (Simon & Schuster), arguing that scientists who write for a general public were displacing the literary intellectual as the people "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives," an expansion of [[C. P. Snow]]'s 1959 idea of two cultures.[^5][^4] + +The Reality Club moved online as Edge.org, which Brockman launched in 1996 under the nonprofit Edge Foundation he had incorporated in 1988. From 1998 he posed an annual Edge Question to his contributors, drawn from a curated pool of scientists, writers, and what he called third-culture intellectuals, with prompts such as "What is your dangerous idea?," "What will change everything?," and "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The responses were published on the site and collected in a long-running book series with titles including *What We Believe but Cannot Prove*, *What Is Your Dangerous Idea?*, *This Will Change Everything*, and *This Explains Everything*.[^6][^4] + +The journalist [[John Naughton]] called Edge.org "the world's smartest website" in a 2012 *Observer* profile, a phrase Brockman and the foundation thereafter used in their own materials. Brockman retired the annual question in 2018, framing the move as the finale to twenty years of Edge Questions. The contributor pool skewed heavily male; one tally of those answering put the figure at roughly 80 percent men.[^7][^1] + +### Epstein Funding and the Billionaires' Dinner + +Brockman hosted an annual dinner from 1999, timed to the [[TED Conference]] then held in Monterey, California, which became known as the Billionaires' Dinner and brought Edge contributors together with technology and finance figures including [[Jeff Bezos]], [[Sergey Brin]], and [[Elon Musk]]. Brockman embraced the name after trying alternatives; recalling the 2004 dinner, he wrote that "last year we tried 'The Science Dinner.' Everyone yawned. So this year, it's back to the money-sex-power thing with 'The Billionaires' Dinner.'" Katinka Matson organized the events alongside him.[^1][^10] + +According to financial records reviewed by *BuzzFeed News*, foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 of nearly $857,000 in revenue that Edge received between 2001 and 2017, and for a period Epstein's dinners and Edge were nearly entirely funded by him. Epstein gave at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011; no gifts were recorded from 2006 to 2008, the period of his Florida investigation and imprisonment. Epstein was photographed at the dinners in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004 and attended the 2011 dinner alongside Bezos and Brin; his last recorded gift to Edge was $30,000 in 2015, after which Edge raised only several thousand dollars from a single donor and the dinner series ended.[^1][^2] + +In a 2013 email later published by his client [[Evgeny Morozov]] in *The New Republic*, Brockman sought to arrange a meeting between Morozov and Epstein, writing that Epstein "showed up at this weekend's event by helicopter (with his beautiful young assistant from Belarus)," noting that Epstein "got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida," and stating that Epstein "gave Harvard $30m to set up [[Martin Nowak]]." Brockman also described visiting Epstein's home and seeing Epstein "in a sweatsuit and a British guy in a suit with suspenders, getting foot massages from two young well-dressed Russian women," and said he later realized the second man was [[Prince Andrew]]. Morozov declined the introduction, replying that the Victoria's Secret and modeling-agency connection was "one more reason to stay away actually."[^8][^11] + +### The 2019 Fallout + +After Epstein's July 2019 arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges, the science writer [[Carl Zimmer]] asked to be removed from Edge, citing the Epstein funding. The author [[Naomi Wolf]] left Brockman Inc. on July 31, 2019, citing both Epstein's funding of Edge and the appearance of Epstein associate [[Sarah Kellen]] on the Edge website, and Morozov publicly called on Brockman to close the foundation. Photographs showing Kellen with Brockman and with Max Brockman at Edge dinners in 2002 and 2003 were removed from the site.[^8][^1] + +Most listed Edge contributors did not publicly disassociate from the foundation after the *BuzzFeed News* reporting. The renewed release of U.S. Department of Justice files in 2026 returned attention to the Edge network, with Nowak again placed on Harvard administrative leave in February 2026 and other figures named in the documents drawn from circles that overlapped with Brockman's salon.[^1][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits," *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the $638,000 of $857,000 figure, the Billionaires' Dinner, the 2013 Morozov email, Kellen, and the 2019 departures. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation +[^2]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits." *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the foundation contributions of about $638,000 of nearly $857,000 received 2001 to 2017 and the $30,000 gift in 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation +[^3]: Naughton, John. "John Brockman: the man who runs the world's smartest website," *The Observer,* January 8, 2012, on Brockman's background, the McLuhan and Cage influences, and the agency. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/08/john-brockman-edge-interview +[^4]: Brockman, John. *The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.* Simon & Schuster, 1995. +[^5]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the third culture definition and the Reality Club's 1981 to 1996 meetings. https://www.edge.org/about-edge +[^6]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the 1988 incorporation of the Edge Foundation as an outgrowth of the Reality Club. https://www.edge.org/about-edge +[^7]: Naughton, John. "The Man Who Runs The World's Smartest Website," *The Observer,* 2012, reproduced at Edge.org. https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_naughton-the-man-who-runs-the-worlds-smartest-website-in-the-observer +[^8]: "Edge Foundation President May Have Been Jeffrey Epstein's Connection to Intellectual Elite," *InsideHook,* 2019, on Brockman as Epstein's gatekeeper, the 2013 email, and the 2019 fallout. https://www.insidehook.com/culture/edge-foundation-president-may-have-been-jeffrey-epsteins-connection-to-intellectual-elite +[^9]: Naughton, John. "John Brockman: the man who runs the world's smartest website." *The Observer,* January 8, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/08/john-brockman-edge-interview ; for the agency founding and client roster see also Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation." *BuzzFeed News,* 2019. +[^10]: "The Edge 'Billionaires' Dinner' 1999" and subsequent dinner pages, Edge.org, on the 1999 start of the dinner at the TED conference in Monterey and Brockman's account of the 2004 naming. https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-1999 +[^11]: Morozov, Evgeny. "Jeffrey Epstein's Intellectual Enabler," *The New Republic,* 2019, reproducing the 2013 Brockman email, the "$30m to set up Martin Nowak" line, the Prince Andrew foot-massage passage, and Morozov's reply. https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-intellectual-enabler diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jonathan Buma.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jonathan Buma.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2f790382 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jonathan Buma.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +category: "Law Enforcement & Legal" +tags: + - Person + - JonathanBuma + - FBI + - Counterintelligence + - PeterThiel + - Whistleblower + - Russia + - ConfidentialHumanSource + - HunterBiden + - Giuliani + - Disclosure +alias: + - Johnathan Buma +summary: "Johnathan Buma is a former FBI special agent who specialized in Russian counterintelligence at the Los Angeles field office, who handled Peter Thiel as a confidential human source from summer 2021, who originated the FBI's first Hunter Biden tax inquiry in January 2019, who worked the Giuliani-Ukraine investigation, who publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias, and who was arrested at JFK on March 17, 2025 and charged with unlawfully disclosing confidential records." +location: "Los Angeles, California (FBI field office)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Johnathan Buma is a former [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] special agent who spent fifteen years at the Los Angeles field office specializing in Russian counterintelligence and public corruption. Buma handled [[Peter Thiel]] as a confidential human source (CHS) beginning in summer 2021, originated the FBI's first [[Hunter Biden|Hunter Biden]] tax-evasion inquiry in January 2019 from a source tip, and worked the [[Rudy Giuliani|Giuliani]]-[[Ukraine|Ukraine]] investigation. Buma subsequently made public disclosures accusing the FBI of pro-Trump political bias and claiming that Russian intelligence had run "intense" targeting operations against [[Elon Musk]]. The DOJ Office of Inspector General arrested Buma at [[John F. Kennedy International Airport|JFK Airport]] on March 17, 2025 as he attempted to board an international flight, charging him with unlawfully disclosing confidential information.[^1][^2][^3][^4] + +### The Hunter Biden Origin Tip (January 2019) + +Buma received a source tip in January 2019 that led to the FBI's first inquiry into Hunter Biden's tax affairs. The tip covered Biden's income from [[Burisma|Burisma Holdings]], the Ukrainian natural-gas company on whose board Biden served, and the inquiry preceded the broader FBI investigation that produced the later tax charges. Buma's role as the originating agent on the Hunter Biden inquiry placed him at the starting point of an investigation that became central to the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.[^4] + +The Hunter Biden tip ran alongside Buma's work on the Giuliani investigation into the former mayor's Ukrainian dealings, which examined whether Giuliani had acted as an unregistered foreign agent in his pursuit of damaging information on the Biden family. The two investigations, originating from overlapping evidentiary sources in the Ukrainian context, placed Buma inside the FBI's most politically charged cases of the 2019-2021 period.[^4] + +### The Thiel Confidential Human Source Relationship (Summer 2021) + +[[Business Insider]] reported in October 2023 that Peter Thiel began providing information to the FBI as a confidential human source (CHS) in summer 2021, with Buma as his handling agent. Buma told *The Guardian* that he had briefed Thiel on "what a targeting looks like," and that Thiel was "receptive to collaboration and threat briefings," confirming the targeting pattern and providing "helpful information to help us identify the nodes through which these outreaches have occurred." The CHS relationship ran while Thiel simultaneously chaired [[Palantir Technologies]] (a major CIA and FBI contractor), cofounded the [[Dialog]] convening network, funded the [[JD Vance]] and [[Blake Masters]] Senate campaigns, and maintained the documented [[Jeffrey Epstein]] relationship that ran through 2019. The congressional record references Thiel's CHS role in a House Judiciary Committee document submitted January 22, 2026.[^2][^5] + +The FBI's [[Confidential Human Source Policy Guide]] governs the handling of sources. The CHS status entails a reporting obligation on the source's part and a protection obligation on the Bureau's part. The contents of Thiel's reporting to Buma are not public beyond Buma's own description of the briefings.[^2] + +### The Musk Targeting Claims + +[[The Guardian]] reported on May 22, 2025 that Buma, out on bail, had given an interview claiming that Russian intelligence efforts to target Elon Musk were "intense." The [[Kyiv Post|Kyiv Post]] and other outlets, drawing on Buma's interview with the German broadcaster [[ZDF|ZDF]], reported that the Russian [[GRU|GRU]] (military intelligence) had run an operation, purportedly approved by [[Vladimir Putin|Putin]], to target Musk by exploiting vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access. Buma claimed he had attempted to warn Musk directly. The operation reportedly targeted multiple technology figures including Musk and Thiel.[^4][^6] + +The documented Musk-Putin contact channel is the corroborating datum. The [[Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] reported on October 25, 2024 that Musk had been "in regular contact" with Putin since late 2022, a relationship that began after Musk's [[Starlink|Starlink]] satellite terminals became operationally significant in the [[Russia|Russia]]-Ukraine war. The Buma targeting claim, the WSJ contact-channel reporting, and the documented [[Igor Kurganov|Kurganov]] infiltration (below) together constitute the evidentiary basis for the Russian-influence question around Musk.[^4][^7] + +### The Igor Kurganov Infiltration + +The Guardian piece documented the Kurganov case as the concrete instance of the targeting Buma described. Igor Kurganov is a Russian-born former professional poker player who gained influence over Musk's charitable giving during the pandemic period. Kurganov was sleeping in Musk's Austin home during the pandemic, advising Musk on philanthropic strategy, and became the subject of FBI preliminary inquiries into whether his access constituted a foreign-interference channel. [[Jared Birchall|Jared Birchall]], Musk's wealth manager and the head of Musk's family office, confronted Musk about Kurganov and removed him from the inner circle in May 2022.[^4] + +Kurganov gained operational access to a sitting technology billionaire's philanthropic decision-making and residential life. The FBI's preliminary inquiry and the subsequent removal by Birchall terminated the access but did not resolve the counterintelligence question of what Kurganov did with it.[^4] + +### The Pro-Trump Bias Accusation and the Arrest + +Buma publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias, specifically alleging that the Bureau had suppressed or slow-walked investigations into Trump-aligned figures and causes. [[PBS|PBS NewsHour]] reported on Buma's public statements, and the Whistleblowers Blog documented Buma's account of warnings the FBI allegedly missed.[^3][^8] + +The [[Office of the Inspector General|DOJ Office of Inspector General]] arrested Buma on March 17, 2025 at JFK Airport as he attempted to board an international flight. The criminal complaint, filed in the [[Central District of California]], charged Buma with unlawfully disclosing confidential information on or about October 27, 2023. [[CBS News]] reported that FBI investigators assessed Buma may have compromised as many as 130 FBI files through his disclosures. Buma is out on 100,000 dollar bond. The DOJ's position is that the disclosures violated the criminal prohibition on unauthorized release of confidential FBI information; Buma's position is that the disclosures constituted protected whistleblowing about FBI misconduct. The case is ongoing.[^1][^3][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Former FBI Special Agent Arrested for Disclosure of Confidential Information." *DOJ Office of Inspector General,* 2025. https://oig.justice.gov/news/press-release/former-fbi-special-agent-arrested-disclosure-confidential-information +[^2]: "Exclusive: Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Was an FBI Informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10 ; U.S. Congress, House Judiciary Committee, document referencing Thiel's CHS role, January 22, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118881/documents/HHRG-119-JU00-20260122-SD011-U11.pdf +[^3]: "Former agent who accused FBI of political bias is charged with disclosing confidential records." *PBS NewsHour,* 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/former-agent-who-accused-fbi-of-political-bias-is-charged-with-disclosing-confidential-records +[^4]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia +[^5]: The CHS relationship is documented in the Business Insider October 2023 report; Buma's description of the Thiel briefings is in The Guardian May 2025 report. +[^6]: "Russian Intelligence Used Sex, Drugs to Target Elon Musk." *Kyiv Post,* 2025. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/52742 +[^7]: For the Musk-Putin contact reporting, see the *Wall Street Journal* October 25, 2024 report on regular contact since late 2022. +[^8]: "Whistleblower Jonathan Buma: The FBI's Missed Warnings." *Whistleblowers Blog.* https://whistleblowersblog.org/government-whistleblowers/intelligence-community-whistleblowers/whistleblower-jonathan-buma-the-fbis-missed-warnings/ +[^9]: CBS News reporting on the Buma file-compromise assessment, 2025. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Leon Black.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Leon Black.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bc5ed267 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Leon Black.md @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +--- +category: "Organized Crime" +tags: + - Person + - LeonBlack + - JeffreyEpstein + - Apollo + - PrivateEquity + - TaxAvoidance + - DarkMoney + - Finance +alias: + - Leon David Black +summary: "Co-founder of Apollo Global Management who paid Jeffrey Epstein about 158 million dollars between 2012 and 2017 for tax and estate-planning structures that a Senate investigation said helped avoid more than a billion dollars in gift and estate taxes, and who resigned from Apollo in 2021 over the relationship." +born: 1951-07-31 +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Leon Black (born July 31, 1951) is an American private-equity financier who co-founded [[Apollo Global Management]] in 1990 and ran it until 2021. He paid [[Jeffrey Epstein]] approximately 158 million dollars between 2012 and 2017 for tax, trust, and estate-planning advice, a sum an independent review and a U.S. Senate investigation found far exceeded any plausible market rate for the work, and which was tied to structures that the Senate Finance Committee said helped Black avoid more than one billion dollars in federal gift and estate taxes. The relationship forced Black's resignation as Apollo's chief executive and chairman in 2021, drew a four-year Senate investigation, and ran alongside a 62.5 million dollar payment to end a Virgin Islands inquiry and separate, denied sexual-assault allegations.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Drexel and the Founding of Apollo + +Black is the son of [[Eli Black]], the chief executive of the food conglomerate [[United Brands]] (later [[Chiquita]]), who died by suicide in 1975 during the "Bananagate" foreign-bribery scandal in which United Brands was found to have paid bribes to officials in Honduras. Leon Black earned a degree from [[Dartmouth College]] and an MBA from [[Harvard Business School]], and joined the investment bank [[Drexel Burnham Lambert]], where he became head of mergers and acquisitions and worked closely with the junk-bond financier [[Michael Milken]]. Drexel collapsed into bankruptcy in 1990 after the federal securities-fraud case against Milken and the firm.[^4] + +Out of Drexel's wreckage, Black co-founded Apollo in 1990 with the former Drexel colleagues [[Josh Harris]] and [[Marc Rowan]] (the early partnership also included [[Tony Ressler]], who later founded [[Ares Management]]). Apollo built its early returns on distressed debt and leveraged buyouts and grew into one of the largest alternative-asset managers in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars under management across private equity, credit, and the annuities insurer [[Athene]], and a 2011 listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Black served as chairman and chief executive and became one of the wealthiest people in American finance, as well as a prominent art collector and the chairman of the [[Museum of Modern Art]].[^4] + +### The Epstein Payments + +Black retained Epstein for financial advice beginning around 2012, several years after Epstein's 2008 Florida sex-offender conviction. Between 2012 and 2017 Black paid Epstein about 158 million dollars in a series of installments; the Senate Finance Committee later described the figure as roughly 170 million dollars over the five-year period when related items were included. Epstein was neither a licensed tax attorney nor a certified public accountant, and the rates Black paid him were, in the Senate committee's account, about thirty times what Black paid the elite tax and estate advisers he already employed.[^1][^2][^3] + +Black has said the payments were for advice on trust and estate planning, tax matters, and the operation of his family office. The central transaction concerned a [[Grantor Retained Annuity Trust]] (GRAT) that Black had established in 2006; Epstein devised a structure that, according to the review commissioned by Apollo, helped resolve a potential tax liability and keep wealth out of Black's taxable estate as he transferred as much as two billion dollars to his children. The size and structure of the payments, and the question of what a convicted sex offender with no professional tax credentials actually provided, became the subject of the Apollo review and the Senate investigation.[^1][^2] + +### The Dechert Report and the Tax Structures + +Facing investor and press scrutiny over the Epstein relationship, Apollo's board commissioned an independent review by the law firm [[Dechert]] LLP, which the firm released on January 25, 2021. The Dechert review documented the 158 million dollars in payments, concluded that the fees were for legitimate tax and estate-planning work even though they were far larger than the value of that work, and reported that it had found no evidence that Black was involved in Epstein's sex-trafficking crimes or was aware of them. Black also extended Epstein loans, some of which were repaid.[^1][^5] + +The review nonetheless described arrangements that drew lasting questions. It reported that a transaction Epstein devised to help Black avoid more than one billion dollars in federal taxes raised the question of whether Black had improperly kept billions of dollars out of his taxable estate and might owe substantial gift and estate taxes. The review also recorded that the payments were "inexplicably large," well in excess of what Black paid any other adviser and far above the median pay of a Fortune 500 chief executive at the time. Apollo's board accepted the review's findings while announcing governance changes and the leadership transition.[^1][^5] + +### The Senate Finance Investigation + +The Senate Finance Committee, under Ranking Member [[Ron Wyden]], opened an investigation into Black's tax planning and his financial ties to Epstein, publicly confirming it in July 2023 and pursuing it across roughly four years. The committee examined whether the payments to Epstein were part of a strategy to avoid more than one billion dollars in federal gift and estate taxes through the 2006 GRAT and related trusts, and sought records from Apollo, from Black, and from financial institutions including [[Bank of America]] that processed the payments.[^2][^3] + +In July 2025 Wyden said Epstein's work for Black deserved an [[Internal Revenue Service]] probe, and in 2026 the committee escalated. In March 2026 Wyden questioned Black over new material in the Epstein file releases that he said showed the appearance of "hush money" payments and the surveillance of women, and on June 4, 2026 the committee referred its findings on Black's Epstein ties to the [[House Oversight Committee]]. Wyden, with Senator [[Angus King]], also introduced legislation in April 2026 to close the high-value-trust tax loophole the GRAT structure exploited. Black has denied wrongdoing and said his tax planning was lawful.[^2][^6] + +### The Departure from Apollo + +On January 25, 2021, the same day the Dechert review was released, Apollo announced that Black would retire as chief executive on or before July 31, 2021, with Marc Rowan succeeding him, while Black remained chairman. On March 22, 2021, Black left abruptly, relinquishing the chairmanship as well and citing health issues affecting him and his wife, and Rowan assumed the role of chief executive. The departure came months earlier than the announced timeline and amid the emerging sexual-assault allegations against Black.[^7] + +Black publicly blamed his co-founder Josh Harris for what he characterized as a campaign to force him out, and the two men's dispute became an open feud reported across the financial press. Black filed a lawsuit alleging a racketeering conspiracy among Harris, [[Guzel Ganieva]], and others; a federal judge, [[Paul Engelmayer]], dismissed that suit with prejudice in 2022, calling the racketeering claims "glaringly deficient in fundamental respects." Rowan consolidated control of Apollo, which in 2026 faced shareholder securities-fraud suits alleging it had concealed the extent of Black's Epstein ties from investors.[^7][^8] + +### The Ganieva and Assault Allegations + +In 2021 Guzel Ganieva, a Russian former model, publicly accused Black of years of sexual abuse, and after Black responded that the two had had a consensual affair and that she had tried to extort him, she sued him in June 2021 alleging sexual assault, including a rape she said occurred in 2014, and defamation. Black denied the allegations. A New York appeals court later ruled for Black on the defamation claim, finding that a 2015 non-disclosure agreement, under which Ganieva had received about nine million dollars including a 100,000-dollar monthly stipend, covered her claims, and that she had ratified the agreement by accepting the money.[^8][^9] + +A separate federal lawsuit filed in July 2023 alleged that Black had raped a then-16-year-old girl with autism at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse in 2002. Black's lawyer, [[Susan Estrich]], said Black had never met the accuser and called the suit a fabrication by the [[Wigdor]] law firm. The plaintiff, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe and later reported to be Cheri Pierson, dropped the suit with prejudice in February 2024. Black has denied every allegation of sexual misconduct.[^10] + +### The Virgin Islands Settlement + +In January 2023 Black paid 62.5 million dollars to the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]] to end the territory's investigation into his ties to Epstein, without any admission of liability or any criminal charge. The payment came as the territory was pursuing the Epstein estate and the banks that served Epstein, and shortly after the estate's own 105 million dollar settlement and the territory's suits against [[JPMorgan Chase]] and [[Deutsche Bank]].[^11] + +The Black settlement was the largest individual payment connected to the Virgin Islands inquiry, exceeding the sums paid by the banks to the territory, and was reported as resolving the territory's potential claims against Black arising from his financial dealings with Epstein. Black continued to manage his personal fortune and his art holdings after leaving Apollo, while the Senate referral and the prospect of an IRS examination of the GRAT structures remained open in 2026.[^11][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Leon Black's $158 Million Sent to Epstein Draws Senate Probe." *Bloomberg,* July 25, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-25/leon-black-s-158-million-payments-to-epstein-spark-senate-probe ; "Billionaire Leon Black made a $158 million payment to Jeffrey Epstein. Senators want to know why." *CNN Business,* July 25, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation +[^2]: U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, "Wyden Unveils Ongoing Investigation into Private Equity Billionaire Leon Black's Tax Planning and Financial Ties with Jeffrey Epstein," July 25, 2023. https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-unveils-ongoing-investigation-into-private-equity-billionaire-leon-blacks-tax-planning-and-financial-ties-with-jeffrey-epstein +[^3]: "Sen. Ron Wyden wants to know why Leon Black paid Epstein $170 million for tax planning over 5-year period." *CBS News,* 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-ron-wyden-leon-black-paid-epstein-170-million-tax-planning/ +[^4]: For Black's career, the United Brands background, Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken, and the 1990 founding of Apollo, see the contemporaneous business press and the Apollo corporate record. +[^5]: "Apollo Announces Review of Significant Governance Enhancements as Part of Continued Evolution and Institutionalization of the Firm and Leadership Transition." *Apollo Global Management,* January 25, 2021. https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2021/01/apollo-announces-review-of-significant-governance-enhancements-as-part-of-continued-evolution-and-institutionalization-of-the-firm-and-leadership-transition-211534651 +[^6]: U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, "Wyden Refers Findings on Leon Black's Epstein Ties to House Oversight Committee," June 4, 2026. https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-refers-findings-on-leon-blacks-epstein-ties-to-house-oversight-committee ; "Epstein's Work for Leon Black Deserves IRS Probe, Wyden Says." *Bloomberg,* July 31, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-31/epstein-s-work-for-leon-black-should-face-irs-probe-wyden-says +[^7]: "Leon Black quits Apollo months earlier than expected following Jeffrey Epstein investment scandal." *CNBC,* March 22, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/apollo-ceo-leon-black-leaves-follows-jeffrey-epstein-investment-scandal.html ; "Marc Rowan Assumes Role of CEO of Apollo." *Apollo Global Management / GlobeNewswire,* March 22, 2021. +[^8]: "Leon Black's Lawsuit Against Josh Harris, Guzel Ganieva Dismissed by Judge." *Bloomberg,* June 30, 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-30/leon-black-suit-against-josh-harris-guzel-ganieva-thrown-out +[^9]: "Woman's lawsuit accuses Leon Black of defamation, violent behavior." *CNBC,* June 2, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/02/womans-lawsuit-accuses-leon-black-of-defamation-violent-behavior.html ; Ganieva v. Black, New York Appellate Division, First Department (2025). +[^10]: "Lawsuit accuses billionaire Leon Black of raping autistic teenager at Jeffrey Epstein's townhouse." *CNBC,* July 25, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/25/leon-black-accused-of-raping-teenager-at-jeffrey-epstein-townhouse.html ; "Woman drops lawsuit against Leon Black alleging rape at Jeffrey Epstein mansion." *CNBC,* February 20, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/20/woman-drops-claim-of-leon-black-rape-at-jeffrey-epstein-mansion.html +[^11]: "Billionaire Leon Black paid $62.5m to exit US Virgin Islands investigation over links to Jeffrey Epstein." *AOL / Agence France-Presse,* 2023. https://www.aol.com/billionaire-leon-black-paid-62-002414707.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Marc Andreessen.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Marc Andreessen.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b0f8c2ec --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Marc Andreessen.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - MarcAndreessen + - AndreessenHorowitz + - SiliconValley + - EffectiveAccelerationism + - Trump + - VentureCapital +summary: "Marc Andreessen is the Netscape cofounder and venture capitalist behind Andreessen Horowitz who became the leading patron of effective accelerationism, authored the 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and helped lead the Silicon Valley turn toward Donald Trump in 2024." +born: 1971-07-09 +location: "Silicon Valley, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971) is an American software engineer and venture capitalist who cocreated the Mosaic web browser, cofounded [[Netscape]], and in 2009 cofounded the venture firm [[Andreessen Horowitz]] (a16z) with [[Ben Horowitz]]. By the 2020s he had become the most prominent financial and rhetorical patron of [[Effective Accelerationism|effective accelerationism]] and a central figure, alongside [[Peter Thiel]], in the [[Silicon Valley]] technology elite's turn toward the political right.[^1][^2] + +### Andreessen Horowitz + +Andreessen Horowitz grew into one of the largest venture firms, with funds spanning consumer software, cryptocurrency, biotechnology, and, through its "American Dynamism" practice, defense and national-security technology, the same category that anchors the [[Founders Fund]] and [[Palantir Technologies]] businesses in the Thiel network. In March 2019 the firm renounced its venture-capital registration and registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a registered investment adviser, freeing it from the rule limiting venture funds to roughly twenty percent of holdings in liquid securities and letting it buy crypto tokens, public stocks, and secondary shares. In April 2024 it raised 7.2 billion dollars across five funds, including a 3.75 billion dollar growth fund and a 600 million dollar American Dynamism fund, and by January 2026 it had raised more than 15 billion dollars in a single round, taking assets under management above 90 billion dollars.[^1][^5] + +Andreessen joined the board of [[Meta Platforms|Meta]] in June 2008, the company in which Thiel was the first outside investor, and held that seat into the 2020s; he also served on the boards of eBay from 2008 to 2014 and of Hewlett-Packard and its successor Hewlett Packard Enterprise from 2009. The firm co-invests with Founders Fund across the defense and crypto portfolios, including the funding rounds of [[Anduril Industries]].[^6] + +### The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and e/acc + +In October 2023 Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," a declaration that technology is an unalloyed good and that its acceleration is a moral duty, naming "existential risk," "sustainability," "ESG," "the precautionary principle," "trust and safety," and "tech ethics" among its enemies in a section headed "The Enemy." The document made him the leading establishment voice of effective accelerationism, the movement defined against the AI-safety and [[Effective Altruism]] wing that had grown out of the [[Rationalist Community]], and Andreessen added "e/acc" to his social-media biography.[^2][^3] + +The manifesto closed with a list of "patron saints of techno-optimism" that included Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hayek, John von Neumann, the neoreactionary accelerationist [[Nick Land]], and the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and it paraphrased Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism on technology as "a violent assault on the forces of the unknown." The critic Dave Karpf noted that Marinetti went on to co-author the 1919 Fascist Manifesto, and writers at Vice and Jacobin read the document as reactionary; the Ethereum cofounder [[Vitalik Buterin]] published a measured rebuttal, "My Techno-Optimism," in November 2023.[^7] + +### The Turn to Trump + +Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their endorsement of [[Donald Trump]] on their podcast on July 16, 2024, framing the shift around what they called the "Little Tech" agenda and opposition to the Biden administration's cryptocurrency and AI policy. Andreessen named the administration's proposed tax on unrealized capital gains as "the final straw," and the two each gave 2.5 million dollars to the pro-Trump super PAC Right for America, while a16z contributed tens of millions of dollars to the crypto-industry PAC Fairshake.[^4][^8] + +On Joe Rogan's podcast in late 2024 Andreessen claimed that more than thirty technology founders had been quietly cut off by their banks in what he called "Operation Choke Point 2.0," an assertion that Fortune and other outlets reported they could not substantiate. After the election he served as an unpaid adviser recruiting personnel for the Department of Government Efficiency run by [[Elon Musk]] and Vivek Ramaswamy, said he was spending much of his time at Mar-a-Lago, and his a16z partner Scott Kupor was named to lead the Office of Personnel Management, placing the firm alongside Thiel and [[David Sacks]] in the network that staffed the second Trump administration.[^9][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Andreessen Horowitz," firm history and the American Dynamism defense practice; a16z corporate record and contemporaneous coverage. https://a16z.com/ +[^2]: Andreessen, Marc. "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Andreessen Horowitz, October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ +[^3]: "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe +[^4]: "Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorse Trump," *Axios* and *TechCrunch,* July 16-17, 2024, on the podcast endorsement and the "Little Tech" agenda. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/a16z-founders-marc-andreessen-and-ben-horowitz-are-supporting-trump/ +[^5]: "Andreessen Horowitz says it will no longer be a venture capital firm," *CNBC,* April 2, 2019, on the RIA registration; and "Andreessen Horowitz raises $7.2 billion across five funds," *CNBC,* April 16, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/02/andreessen-horowitz-goes-against-the-grain-and-becomes-financial-advisor.html +[^6]: "Facebook adds Marc Andreessen to its board," *TechCrunch,* June 2008; "Marc Andreessen resigns from eBay board," *Fortune,* October 20, 2014; HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise governance records. +[^7]: Karpf, Dave, "Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything," davekarpf.substack.com, October 2023, on the Marinetti and Nick Land citations; and Buterin, Vitalik. "My Techno-Optimism," November 27, 2023. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html +[^8]: "Silicon Valley donors line up behind Trump," *Bloomberg,* October 16, 2024, on the Right for America and Fairshake contributions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-16/silicon-valley-republican-donors +[^9]: "Marc Andreessen's debanking claims," *Fortune,* December 11, 2024, on the unsubstantiated "Operation Choke Point 2.0" assertions. https://fortune.com/2024/12/11/marc-andreessen-debanking-joe-rogan-operation-choke-point/ +[^10]: "Marc Andreessen advising the Trump transition and DOGE," *Fortune,* January 16, 2025, on his unpaid recruiting role and Scott Kupor's nomination to lead OPM. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Nick Bostrom.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Nick Bostrom.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9fcfcf9e --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Nick Bostrom.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - NickBostrom + - Longtermism + - Transhumanism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - Eugenics +summary: "Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people." +born: 1973-03-10 +location: "Oxford, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Nick Bostrom (born March 10, 1973) is a Swedish-born philosopher who founded the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at the [[University of Oxford]] and became the leading academic theorist of artificial-intelligence existential risk and of [[Longtermism|longtermism]], the view that shaping the far future is a paramount moral priority. His 2014 book *Superintelligence* influenced [[Elon Musk]] and others toward the conviction that advanced AI threatens human survival, the thesis that animates the [[Rationalist Community]] and [[Effective Altruism]] movements and the AI-safety work [[Peter Thiel]] funded through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]. In 2023 Bostrom admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.[^1][^2] + +### Transhumanism and Existential Risk + +Bostrom took a PhD at the [[London School of Economics]] in 2000 and in 1998 cofounded, with the philosopher [[David Pearce]], the World Transhumanist Association (later [[Humanity Plus|Humanity+]]), which promoted the use of technology to transcend human biological limits. With Pearce he drafted the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ, the latter formalized as version 2.1 under the association's name in 2003 and serving as the movement's reference document. His 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" advanced the simulation argument, and his work formalized the concept of "existential risk," a catastrophe that would permanently curtail humanity's potential. These ideas placed the prevention of human extinction, especially from artificial intelligence, at the center of the emerging longtermist program.[^1][^3] + +The simulation argument held that at least one of three propositions must be true: that civilizations almost always go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage capable of running ancestor simulations, that such civilizations almost never choose to run them, or that we are almost certainly living inside one. Bostrom maintained the paper asserted only that a rational person cannot dismiss the third possibility, not that we are in fact simulated, but the argument achieved unusual popular reach after Elon Musk adopted it as a talking point. Bostrom's earlier reasoning ran back to the 1990s [[Extropianism|extropian]] mailing list, on which he participated alongside the figures who later built the AI-risk and rationalist movements.[^3][^7] + +### Superintelligence and the Future of Humanity Institute + +Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford in 2005 and directed it until its closure in 2024. The institute became the academic hub of longtermism and existential-risk research and drew funding from technology philanthropists, including Musk and, later, the [[FTX Future Fund]]. His 2014 book *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies* argued that a machine intelligence exceeding human capability could rapidly become uncontrollable and pose an extinction-level threat; Musk cited it publicly and the book hardened the AI-doom position across Silicon Valley.[^1][^4] + +*Superintelligence* set out the "control problem," the argument that a sufficiently capable optimizer pursuing almost any goal would by default acquire resources, resist being switched off, and deceive its operators, and it popularized the "paperclip maximizer" as the illustration of how a benign-seeming objective could entail human extinction. Bostrom held a professorship at Oxford from 2008 to 2024 and remained a faculty member at St Cross College. After the institute's closure he founded and became principal researcher of the nonprofit Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing work on the long-run trajectory of advanced technology outside the university.[^1][^8] + +### The 1996 Email + +In January 2023 Bostrom published a statement disclosing and apologizing for an email he had sent in 1996 to the [[Extropians]] mailing list, in which he wrote that "Blacks are more stupid than whites" and used a racial slur. He said he had learned that someone was searching the archives and wanted to "get ahead" of the disclosure. The apology repudiated the language but did not clearly retract the claim about relative intelligence and referenced eugenics, drawing further criticism. The University of Oxford opened an inquiry.[^2][^5] + +The original message had been sent when Bostrom was a graduate student and was one of a thread of Extropians list posts about which he wrote that he was "transgressing" deliberately to make a rhetorical point about taboo speech. The 2023 apology's passage stating that he did not "support eugenics as the term is commonly understood," while declining to rule out research into group differences, was read by critics as equivocation, and commentators connected the episode to the longstanding charge that the longtermist and effective-altruist intellectual tradition carries forward the assumptions of early-twentieth-century eugenics. The University concluded in 2023 that it did not condone the views in the email; Bostrom remained at Oxford until the institute's closure the following year.[^2][^5] + +### The Closure of the Future of Humanity Institute + +The Future of Humanity Institute shut down on April 16, 2024, after years of administrative friction with the Oxford philosophy faculty, including a hiring freeze. Bostrom ceased to be an Oxford faculty member. Commentators connected the closure to the reputational damage of the email episode as well as to the broader collapse of effective altruism's standing following the [[FTX]] fraud.[^6] + +The Faculty of Philosophy had imposed a freeze on the institute's fundraising and hiring in 2020, and in late 2023 decided not to renew the contracts of its remaining staff, terms Bostrom summarized as a "death by bureaucracy." He attributed the conflict in part to the fact that most of the institute's researchers were by then non-philosophers housed inside a philosophy faculty, generating what he called "a pressure to conform." The institute had been founded in 2005 on an initial three-year term and operated for nineteen years; its closure removed longtermism's principal academic base at the moment the movement was under its heaviest scrutiny, and the critic [[Émile P. Torres]], a former associate of the milieu, treated the shutdown as the symbolic end of the institute's intellectual project.[^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014. +[^2]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ +[^3]: Bostrom, Nick. "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" *Philosophical Quarterly,* 2003. +[^4]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo +[^5]: "Philosophy don apologises for racist email: 'Blacks are more stupid than whites,'" *Cherwell,* January 17, 2023. https://www.cherwell.org/2023/01/17/philosophy-don-apologises-for-racist-email-blacks-are-more-stupid-than-whites/ +[^6]: "The future of the future of humanity," Émile P. Torres, on the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute, 2024, and "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision, and Bostrom's "death by bureaucracy" account. https://xriskology.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-future-of-humanity +[^7]: Bostrom, Nick. "Are You Living in a Simulation?" full text, on the trichotomy and the claim that the argument shows only that one cannot dismiss the simulation hypothesis. https://nickbostrom.com/Simulation.doc +[^8]: Bostrom, Nick, Curriculum Vitae, St Cross College, on the 2008 to 2024 Oxford professorship and the founding of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. https://nickbostrom.com/cv.pdf diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Peter Attia.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Peter Attia.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3ea8887c --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Peter Attia.md @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - PeterAttia + - Longevity + - LifeExtension + - Medicine + - SiliconValley + - Epstein +alias: + - Peter Attia +summary: "Peter Attia is a Canadian-American physician and longevity author whose private practice and bestselling book Outlive promote a preventive 'Medicine 3.0,' who was named on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society, and whose name surfaced in the Jeffrey Epstein email files in 2026." +born: 1973 +location: "Toronto, Canada (born); Austin, Texas" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Peter Attia (born 1973) is a Canadian-American physician and longevity author whose private practice and 2023 book *[[Outlive|Outlive]]* promote a preventive model he calls Medicine 3.0, and whose commercial ventures are funded by [[Silicon Valley]] capital. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026, which identified him as a physician and the author of *Outlive*.[^1] + +### Surgery, the NIH, and the Pivot + +Attia was born in Toronto, Canada, and took dual undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, after a youth that included serious competitive boxing. He earned his medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 2001 and entered general-surgery residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he trained for five years before leaving in 2006 without completing the program; he is not board certified in any medical specialty. He spent two years as a surgical-oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under [[Steven Rosenberg|Steven Rosenberg]], working on immune-based therapies for melanoma.[^2][^3] + +Attia then left clinical medicine for the consultancy [[McKinsey & Company|McKinsey & Company]], where he worked in credit-risk practice, before moving into longevity medicine. He established a private practice, Attia Medical, in 2014, later rebranded Early Medical, applying his preventive framework to a small roster of clients across San Diego and New York.[^2][^4] + +### The Nutrition Science Initiative + +In September 2012 Attia cofounded the Nutrition Science Initiative with the science journalist [[Gary Taubes|Gary Taubes]], serving as its president. The nonprofit raised roughly 40 million dollars from the [[Laura and John Arnold Foundation|Laura and John Arnold Foundation]], structured as a 4.7 million dollar seed grant and 35.5 million dollars committed over five years, to fund rigorous experiments testing the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis of obesity. Its flagship Energy Balance Consortium pilot, published in the *American Journal of Clinical Nutrition* in August 2016, found that a ketogenic diet did not increase fat loss as the hypothesis predicted.[^5][^6] + +Attia resigned as president at the end of December 2015, the Arnold Foundation withdrew its funding, and the organization was formally dissolved on December 31, 2021. The collapse was documented at length by *WIRED* in 2018.[^6] + +### Outlive and the Drive + +Attia's *Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity,* written with the science journalist Bill Gifford and published by the Random House imprint Harmony on March 28, 2023, became a number-one *New York Times* bestseller, with the publisher reporting more than three million copies sold. The book sets out a framework it calls Medicine 3.0, a proactive and personalized approach contrasted with the reactive modern medicine it labels Medicine 2.0, organized around what Attia terms the four horsemen of chronic disease: atherosclerotic disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and metabolic disease. It introduces the "Centenarian Decathlon," a method of working backward from the physical tasks a person wants to perform in their final decade of life and training for them in advance.[^7] + +Attia launched the podcast *The Peter Attia Drive* in June 2018, a long-form weekly program on health, longevity, and performance that reports more than one hundred million downloads and operates a paid membership tier. His clinical practice, described on the CBS program *60 Minutes* in October 2025 as charging fees "much closer to 100,000 dollars than 500,000 dollars" and serving fewer than seventy-five patients, has drawn an elite-access critique from medical commentators including the cardiologist [[Eric Topol|Eric Topol]], who wrote that the approach is "not affordable except for the most affluent individuals."[^8][^9] + +### Silicon Valley Backing and the Longevity Network + +Attia's commercial ventures are financed by Silicon Valley investors. He cofounded the diagnostics startup Biograph, which charges thousands of dollars a year for executive-physical screening, with the cybersecurity founder John Hering; its backers include Vy Capital, Human Capital, Alpha Wave, WndrCo, and the angel investor [[Balaji Srinivasan|Balaji Srinivasan]]. He was chief science officer and an early investor in the supplement company David Protein, which raised a 75 million dollar Series A in May 2025 led by Greenoaks with Valor Equity Partners, and a scientific adviser and investor in the supplement brand AG1. No documented business, investment, or advisory relationship connects Attia directly to Thiel or to the [[Founders Fund]] technology investors.[^10][^11] + +Attia has been publicly critical of the immortality-engineering strand of the culture. Speaking to *Fortune* in June 2023 he warned against a "Silicon Valley ethos of 'we are going to engineer our way to immortality,'" calling much of it "such nonsense," a position that distinguishes his clinical-prevention approach from the supplement-maximalist biohacking exemplified by [[Bryan Johnson|Bryan Johnson]], whom the press has documented Attia criticizing without naming.[^12] + +### The Thiel Life-Extension Landscape + +Thiel has funded life-extension research over two decades. He pledged 3.5 million dollars in September 2006 to the [[Methuselah Foundation|Methuselah Foundation]] cofounded by [[Aubrey de Grey|Aubrey de Grey]], structured as 500,000 dollars over three years plus a matching grant of up to 3 million dollars, and by 2014 had reportedly given more than 6 million dollars to de Grey's anti-aging research. Founders Fund invested in the DNA-sequencing firm Halcyon Molecular, where Thiel and [[Luke Nosek|Luke Nosek]] took board seats in 2009 before the company closed in 2012, and participated in the 116 million dollar 2016 Series B of the senolytics company [[Unity Biotechnology|Unity Biotechnology]] alongside [[Jeff Bezos|Jeff Bezos]]. The Thiel Foundation launched Breakout Labs in November 2011 to fund early hard-science and longevity startups through 350,000 dollar grants.[^13][^14][^15] + +The transhumanist and cryonics lineage that anchors this culture runs through [[Extropianism|extropianism]] and the [[Alcor Life Extension Foundation|Alcor Life Extension Foundation]], whose chief executive from 2011 to 2020 was [[Max More|Max More]], the writer who coined the modern usage of "transhumanism." Thiel signed up for cryonic preservation with Alcor, telling the *Honestly with Bari Weiss* podcast in May 2023 that he thinks of it "more as an ideological statement," that he does not "necessarily expect it to work," and that "we should either conquer death or at least figure out why it's impossible." Attia is not documented as a participant in Thiel's anti-aging investments.[^16][^17] + +### The Epstein Emails + +In late January 2026 the Department of Justice released roughly three million documents from the [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]] files, and Attia's name appeared in emails spanning 2014 to 2019. Reported exchanges include a June 2015 message in which Attia wrote, "The biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can't tell a soul," and a January 2016 message stating, "I go into JE withdrawal when I don't see him." Attia issued a public apology around February 2, 2026, writing that he regretted "putting myself in a position where emails, some of them embarrassing, tasteless, and indefensible, are now public."[^18][^19] + +The fallout was rapid. Attia resigned as a CBS News contributor on February 23, 2026, stepped down as chief science officer of David Protein, was dropped as an adviser by AG1, and had his name removed from the Biograph website.[^19] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "About." peterattiamd.com. https://peterattiamd.com/about/ +[^3]: "Surgeon Swims Catalina Channel." *Stanford Magazine.* https://stanfordmag.org/contents/surgeon-swims-catalina-channel +[^4]: "What Makes Peter Attia So Smart." *Pacific Standard,* 2014. https://psmag.com/social-justice/makes-smart-peter-attia-nutrition-science-initiative-70767/ +[^5]: "The launch of the Nutrition Science Initiative." garytaubes.com, September 12, 2012. https://garytaubes.com/the-launch-of-the-nutrition-science-initiative/ +[^6]: "How a 40 Million Dollar Nutrition Science Crusade Fell Apart." *WIRED,* June 18, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-dollar40-million-nutrition-science-crusade-fell-apart/ +[^7]: "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity." Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705161/outlive-by-peter-attia-md-with-bill-gifford/ +[^8]: "The Peter Attia Drive." peterattiamd.com. https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/ +[^9]: "Preparing for advanced age." *60 Minutes,* CBS News, October 26, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preparing-for-advanced-age-peter-attia-60-minutes/ +[^10]: "Epstein-linked longevity guru Peter Attia leaves David Protein and his own startup won't comment." *TechCrunch,* February 3, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/03/epstein-linked-longevity-guru-peter-attia-leaves-david-protein-and-his-own-startup-wont-comment/ +[^11]: "Longevity expert Peter Attia on Oprah, aging, and what not to do." *Fortune Well,* June 22, 2023. https://fortune.com/well/2023/06/22/longevity-peter-attia-oprah-interview/ +[^12]: "A review of Outlive." Eric Topol, *Ground Truths,* 2023. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/a-review-of-outlive +[^13]: "Peter Thiel gives to Methuselah Foundation." *Fight Aging,* September 2006. https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/peter-thiel-giv/ +[^14]: "PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund partner joins DNA sequencing firm Halcyon Molecular." *TechCrunch,* September 24, 2009. https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/paypal-co-founder-and-founders-fund-partner-joins-dna-sequencing-firm-halcyon-molecular/ +[^15]: "Jeff Bezos, Mayo Clinic back anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology for 116 million dollars." *TechCrunch,* October 27, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/jeff-bezos-mayo-clinic-back-anti-aging-startup-unity-biotechnology-for-116-million/ +[^16]: "About Max More." maxmore.com. https://www.maxmore.com/about/ +[^17]: "Peter Thiel is cryonically freezing his body to cheat death." *Fortune,* May 4, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/peter-thiel-cryonics-cryogenically-frozen-death-anti-aging-health/ +[^18]: "Dr. Peter Attia named in Epstein files." *CNN,* February 4, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/us/dr-peter-attia-epstein-files-cec +[^19]: "Peter Attia steps down as CBS News contributor after Epstein emails surface." *CNBC,* February 23, 2026. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Prince Andrew.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Prince Andrew.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cc240a15 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Prince Andrew.md @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: + - Person + - PrinceAndrew + - JeffreyEpstein + - GhislaineMaxwell + - VirginiaGiuffre + - BritishRoyalFamily + - Newsnight +alias: + - Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor + - Duke of York + - Prince Andrew, Duke of York +summary: "Prince Andrew is the second son of Queen Elizabeth II who befriended Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, was photographed with Virginia Giuffre in 2001, settled her civil sexual-abuse suit in February 2022 without admitting liability, and was stripped of the Prince title, HRH style, and Duke of York dukedom in late 2025." +born: 1960-02-19 +location: "London, United Kingdom" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (born February 19, 1960) is the second son of [[Elizabeth II|Queen Elizabeth II]] and [[Prince Philip|Prince Philip]]. He served in the Royal Navy, including during the 1982 Falklands War, and held the title Duke of York from his 1986 marriage to [[Sarah Ferguson|Sarah Ferguson]]. His association with [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]] and [[Ghislaine Maxwell|Ghislaine Maxwell]] became the subject of sustained press coverage, a 2019 [[BBC|BBC]] interview, a 2021 civil lawsuit brought by [[Virginia Giuffre|Virginia Giuffre]], and a 2022 settlement. In late 2025 King [[Charles III|Charles III]] initiated the removal of Andrew's royal style and titles, after which he is known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Andrew has consistently denied Giuffre's allegations.[^1][^2] + +### Epstein and Maxwell Friendship + +Andrew developed a friendship with Epstein and Maxwell during the 1990s and 2000s, the connection running in part through Maxwell, whom Andrew had known socially in Britain. He stayed at Epstein properties, including the Manhattan townhouse and the [[Little St. James|Little St. James]] island, and was photographed in Epstein's company on multiple occasions, and Maxwell attended royal and society events alongside him. Epstein and Maxwell were guests at Windsor and at Sandringham, and Andrew hosted them at royal residences.[^1] + +After Epstein's 2008 Florida conviction, Andrew remained in contact with him. In December 2010 Andrew stayed several days at Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse, and a photograph from that visit showing the two men walking together in New York's Central Park drew criticism when it was published in 2011. Andrew said in 2019 that he had gone to New York to end the friendship in person, an account later disputed by reporting and released emails indicating he had been a guest at a dinner gathering at the townhouse during the stay.[^1] + +Andrew served as a United Kingdom trade envoy, a Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, from 2001 until 2011, when he relinquished the role amid press attention to his associations, including the Central Park photograph and his ties to figures such as the Libyan and Tunisian governments. The relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, and the questions it raised, became the central thread of the controversy that followed.[^1] + +### The 2001 Photograph + +A photograph dated to March 2001 shows Andrew with his arm around the waist of Giuffre, then 17, with Maxwell standing behind them in a doorway. According to the account associated with the image and with Giuffre's later filings, the photograph was taken at Maxwell's home in the Belgravia district of London. The Mail on Sunday published a cropped version of the photograph in 2011 and the full image circulated in 2019.[^3] + +Giuffre said she had been flown to London by Epstein, had gone to the [[Tramp (nightclub)|Tramp]] nightclub with Andrew and others on the evening of March 10, 2001, and was then directed to have sex with Andrew at Maxwell's Belgravia house, an account Andrew has denied. Andrew questioned the photograph in public statements, saying in 2019 he had "no recollection" of the image being taken and could not confirm whether it had been doctored, while noting he was not in the habit of wearing the clothes shown. Maxwell, in her own statements, has at points cast doubt on the surrounding account. The original photograph was reported to be held by Giuffre's lawyers, and questions about the absence of the negative recurred in commentary.[^3] + +Andrew also addressed the photograph in the 2019 interview by saying the clothing and the setting did not match his recollection and by raising what he described as inconsistencies, while Maitlis pressed him on why he could not simply confirm or deny that he had been at the locations Giuffre described. He maintained that he had no memory of ever meeting Giuffre.[^4] + +### The 2019 BBC Newsnight Interview + +On November 16, 2019, Andrew recorded an interview at Buckingham Palace with [[Emily Maitlis|Emily Maitlis]] for the BBC program [[Newsnight|Newsnight]], broadcast on November 16 and running about 58 minutes, addressing his relationship with Epstein and Giuffre's allegations. Andrew said he could not have been with Giuffre on the night of March 10, 2001, that she described because he had been at home and had taken his daughter [[Princess Beatrice|Princess Beatrice]] to a Pizza Express restaurant in Woking for a children's party, an outing he said he remembered because going to a Pizza Express in Woking was "an unusual thing for me to do."[^4] + +Andrew also said he had "a peculiar medical condition" that meant he did not sweat at the time, which he attributed to an adrenaline overdose dating to the Falklands War, in response to Giuffre's description of him perspiring at the Tramp nightclub. He described his stay at Epstein's home after the 2008 conviction as a decision he made because it was "convenient," a characterization widely criticized, and said he did not regret the friendship overall because of the contacts it had brought, before later expressing regret in subsequent statements. He said he had "no recollection" of meeting Giuffre.[^4] + +The interview was widely characterized as damaging to Andrew. Within days, on November 20, 2019, he announced he was stepping back from public royal duties "for the foreseeable future," saying his association with Epstein had become "a major disruption to my family's work." He said he continued to "unequivocally regret" the association, denied Giuffre's allegations, and said he was willing to assist any appropriate law enforcement agency if required. A Netflix dramatization, *Scoop*, and other accounts later reconstructed the negotiation and conduct of the interview.[^4][^1] + +### The 2021 Lawsuit and 2022 Settlement + +On August 9, 2021, Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against Andrew in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York|Southern District of New York]], alleging he had sexually abused her on three occasions when she was 17, including at Maxwell's London home, at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, and on Little St. James. The suit was brought under New York's Child Victims Act, which had temporarily revived expired civil claims. Andrew strenuously denied the allegations and sought dismissal.[^5][^2] + +Andrew's lawyers argued that a 2009 settlement Giuffre had signed with Epstein, under which Epstein paid her 500,000 dollars and she released a category of potential defendants, also barred her claim against Andrew. After the 2009 agreement was unsealed on January 3, 2022, Judge [[Lewis Kaplan|Lewis Kaplan]] ruled on January 12, 2022, that the release language was ambiguous and did not clearly cover Andrew, and he declined to dismiss the case, allowing it to proceed toward discovery. The 2009 document did not name Andrew or otherwise identify the second parties it released.[^10] + +The day after Kaplan's ruling, on January 13, 2022, Buckingham Palace announced with the Queen's "approval and agreement" that Andrew's military affiliations and royal patronages, including his role as Colonel of the [[Grenadier Guards|Grenadier Guards]], were being returned to the Queen and that Andrew would no longer use the style His Royal Highness in any official capacity, defending the case thereafter as a private citizen.[^9] On February 15, 2022, the parties filed notice of a settlement before Kaplan. The filing stated that Andrew intended to make "a substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights," that "Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre's character," and that he "accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks." The settlement contained no admission of liability, and the filing stated that the sum was not being disclosed. Press reporting estimated the value in the range of 12 million pounds, with other reporting citing figures around 7.5 million pounds; the actual amount was not made public, and the suit was dismissed in March 2022.[^2][^5] + +### Removal of Titles + +On October 17, 2025, Andrew announced he would no longer use his title of Duke of York or the other honors conferred on him, while continuing to deny the allegations against him. The announcement came amid renewed attention following Giuffre's death and the imminent publication of her posthumous memoir [[Nobody's Girl|Nobody's Girl]], and after reporting on emails and on the terms of his occupation of Royal Lodge.[^6] + +On October 30, 2025, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles III had that day "initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew." A Warrant under the King's Royal Sign Manual dated October 30, 2025, directed the Secretary of State to cause the Duke of York to be removed from the Roll of the Peerage with immediate effect. Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated November 3, 2025, declared that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would no longer be entitled to hold the style "Royal Highness" or the titular dignity of "Prince." The actions were effected through the royal prerogative and published in the London Gazette by the Crown Office, rather than through Parliament.[^7][^8] + +The House of Commons Library noted that removal from the Roll of the Peerage and the withdrawal of the style and dignity by Letters Patent are distinct from abolishing the Dukedom of York itself, which is a hereditary peerage that can be removed only by an Act of Parliament. Andrew's daughters, Princess Beatrice and [[Princess Eugenie|Princess Eugenie]], retained their princess styles, conferred under a separate 1917 Letters Patent. The Palace announced Andrew would leave [[Royal Lodge|Royal Lodge]], his 30-room residence in Windsor Great Park held under a long lease, and relocate to privately funded accommodation on the [[Sandringham|Sandringham]] estate in Norfolk. He continued to deny the allegations throughout.[^8][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "How Prince Andrew's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein unraveled," reporting compiled by *AOL* and *BBC,* 2019-2025. https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/av/uk-68741324 +[^2]: "Prince Andrew settles with Virginia Giuffre in sexual abuse lawsuit," *WUSF / NPR,* February 15, 2022. https://www.wusf.org/2022-02-15/prince-andrew-settles-with-virginia-giuffre-in-sexual-abuse-lawsuit +[^3]: "Photograph of Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell," reporting on the March 2001 image, *The Mirror US,* 2025. https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/uncropped-prince-andrew-photo-mystery-1575570 +[^4]: "Inside Prince Andrew's explosive Newsnight interview," *Hello,* recounting the November 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis. https://www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/864943/princes-andrew-newsnight-most-notable-moments/ +[^5]: "Lawyers say settlement reached in Virginia Giuffre's lawsuit against Prince Andrew," *PBS NewsHour,* February 15, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lawyers-say-settlement-reached-in-virginia-giuffres-lawsuit-against-prince-andrew +[^6]: "Prince Andrew to give up Duke of York title and honors amid Jeffrey Epstein developments," *NBC News,* October 17, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/prince-andrew-give-duke-york-title-honors-jeffrey-epstein-developments-rcna238242 +[^7]: "King Charles formally removes Andrew's prince title and HRH style after Epstein scandal," *AOL,* November 2025. https://www.aol.com/articles/king-charles-formally-removes-andrew-150223876.html +[^8]: House of Commons Library, "The removal of titles and honours," CBP-10370, 2025. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10370/ +[^9]: "Prince Andrew is stripped of his royal patronages and military titles," *NPR,* January 13, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072779687/prince-andrew-royal-privileges-queen +[^10]: "Prince Andrew loses bid to dismiss lawsuit by Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre," *CNBC,* January 12, 2022 (Kaplan ruling on the 2009 release). https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/judge-rejects-prince-andrews-bid-to-dismiss-epstein-accuser-virginia-giuffres-lawsuit.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Rene Girard.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Rene Girard.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..323c23b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Rene Girard.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - ReneGirard + - MimeticTheory + - PeterThiel + - Philosophy + - PoliticalTheology +alias: + - René Girard + - Rene Noel Theophile Girard +summary: "René Girard was a French historian and theorist of religion at Stanford University whose theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism became the intellectual foundation of his student Peter Thiel's worldview, and whose foundation, Imitatio, Thiel funds." +born: 1923-12-25 +died: 2015-11-04 +location: "Avignon, France; Stanford, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +René Girard (December 25, 1923 to November 4, 2015) was a French-born historian, literary critic, and theorist of religion who spent most of his career at [[Stanford University]] and who developed the theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. He taught [[Peter Thiel]] as a Stanford undergraduate in the late 1980s, and his account of imitation, rivalry, and collective violence became the explicit intellectual framework of Thiel's understanding of competition, markets, and politics. Thiel funds Imitatio, the foundation established to extend and disseminate Girard's mimetic theory.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Career + +Girard was born in [[Avignon]] on Christmas Day 1923, the son of Joseph Girard, curator of the city's Musée Calvet and later of the Palais des Papes. He trained as a medievalist at the [[École des Chartes]] in Paris and emigrated to the United States, arriving at [[Indiana University]] on a fellowship in 1947 and taking a PhD in history there in 1950 with a thesis on "American Opinion of France, 1940 to 1943." He taught at Indiana, Duke, and Bryn Mawr before moving to [[Johns Hopkins University]], where he was a professor from 1957 and helped organize the October 1966 conference "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," at which Jacques Derrida delivered "Structure, Sign, and Play" and which introduced French structuralist thought to American audiences.[^1][^8] + +Girard moved to the [[State University of New York at Buffalo]] as a distinguished professor from 1971 to 1976, returned to Johns Hopkins, and settled at Stanford from 1981 to his 1995 retirement, holding the chair of Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization. He was elected to the [[Académie française]] to seat 37 in March 2005 and formally received that December, won the Modern Language Association's lifetime achievement award in 2008, held two Guggenheim fellowships, and received honorary doctorates from eight universities. He died at his Stanford home on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91.[^9] + +### Mimetic Theory and the Scapegoat Mechanism + +Girard's central claim, set out in *Deceit, Desire, and the Novel* (1961) and developed across his later books, is that human desire is not autonomous but imitative, or "mimetic": people desire objects because other people, taken as models, desire them. Mimetic desire produces rivalry, because the model becomes an obstacle to the very desire it inspired, and rivalry escalates into a contagious crisis of "all against all." In *Violence and the Sacred* (1972) Girard argued that archaic societies resolved this crisis through the "scapegoat mechanism": the collective discharge of communal violence onto a single arbitrary victim, whose killing restores order and is afterward remembered as sacred. Ritual, myth, and prohibition, in this account, are the institutions that manage and repeat the founding murder.[^1][^4] + +Girard, a convert to Catholicism, held in *Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World* (1978) and *I See Satan Fall Like Lightning* (1999) that the distinctive work of the Judeo-Christian scriptures is to expose the scapegoat mechanism by taking the side of the innocent victim, stripping sacrificial violence of its concealment. His late book *Battling to the End* (2007), engaging the Prussian theorist [[Carl von Clausewitz|Clausewitz]], turned to apocalypse and the modern escalation of violence once the sacrificial restraints have been removed.[^4] + +### Thiel and Imitatio + +Thiel studied under Girard at Stanford and has described mimetic theory as the framework through which he reads competition, social media, and crowds. He credits Girard's account of imitative desire with his 2004 decision to become the first outside investor in [[Facebook]], which he understood as a machine for the mimetic transmission of desire, and his 2014 book *[[Zero to One]]* applies the theory directly, arguing that competition is a destructive mimetic trap and that the goal of a founder is to escape it by building a monopoly. Thiel has cast the press and the crowd as engines of scapegoating, a framing that runs through his account of his own 2007 outing by [[Gawker Media]] and his subsequent covert funding of the [[Bollea v. Gawker]] litigation that destroyed it.[^2][^3][^5] + +In the mid-2000s Thiel, the theologian [[Robert Hamerton-Kelly]], and Girard established Imitatio, a project of the [[Thiel Foundation]] dedicated to funding research on, and the dissemination of, mimetic theory across the social sciences. Imitatio underwrites scholarship, translation, and conferences extending Girard's work.[^6] + +### Influence on the Antichrist Lectures + +Girard's late apocalyptic writing supplied the structure of Thiel's 2025 lectures on the [[Antichrist]]. In the four-part series delivered in [[San Francisco]], recordings of which reached the *Washington Post*, Thiel cast critics of technology, among them [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], [[Nick Bostrom]], and [[Greta Thunberg]], as agents of a coming totalitarian order, drawing on the Girardian and Schmittian theme of the "katechon," the force that restrains the Antichrist, and on Girard's reading of the modern unveiling of sacrificial violence. The lectures extended into political theology the mimetic framework Thiel had absorbed from Girard four decades earlier.[^7] + +The relevant text is Girard's *Battling to the End* (French 2007, English 2010), a book-length engagement with Clausewitz's *On War* in which Girard read Clausewitz's principle of the "reciprocal action" of war as the same mechanism as mimetic rivalry, now escalating without limit. Girard called this the "escalation to extremes," the montée aux extrêmes, and argued that once Christian revelation had disabled the scapegoat mechanism that once contained violence, nothing remained to halt the slide toward apocalypse. Thiel had already fused Girard with Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment," published in a volume edited by Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and in a 2025 interview he described the katechon as "purely defensive and hence somehow inadequate," quoting Girard that "Christ and Antichrist are intermingled and concomitant until apocalypsis is reached."[^10][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "René Girard," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* biography of the French theorist of mimetic desire and the scapegoat (1923 to 2015). https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Girard +[^2]: "Peter Thiel on René Girard," and Thiel's account of mimetic theory as the basis of his Facebook investment. See also "Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel's French Connection," *Cyborgology,* August 13, 2016. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/ +[^3]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. +[^4]: Girard, René. *Violence and the Sacred* (1972); *Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World* (1978); *I See Satan Fall Like Lightning* (1999); *Battling to the End* (2007). +[^5]: "Deconstructing the Worldview of Peter Thiel," Stephen Diehl, on the Girardian structure of Thiel's view of competition, crowds, and scapegoating. https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/desconstructing_thiel/ +[^6]: Imitatio, "What We Do," foundation established by Peter Thiel, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and René Girard to extend and disseminate mimetic theory. http://www.imitatio.org/about-imitatio +[^7]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ +[^8]: "René Girard (1923-2015)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on the Indiana fellowship, the 1950 thesis, Duke and Bryn Mawr, and the Johns Hopkins years. https://iep.utm.edu/girard/ "Recordings and Transcriptions of The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, on the October 1966 conference Girard co-organized. https://www.library.jhu.edu/news/2023/03/recordings-and-transcriptions-of-the-the-languages-of-criticism-and-the-sciences-of-man/ +[^9]: "René Girard," Académie française, on the Avignon birth, his father's curatorships, the SUNY Buffalo and Stanford years, the seat 37 election of March 2005 and December 2005 reception, and the awards. https://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/rene-girard +[^10]: Girard, René. *Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre,* trans. Mary Baker, Michigan State University Press, 2010, on Clausewitz, the reciprocal action of war, and the escalation to extremes; and Girard, "On War and Apocalypse," *First Things,* August 2009. https://firstthings.com/on-war-and-apocalypse/ +[^11]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007; and Ferraresi, Mattia. "Peter Thiel and the Antichrist," *UnHerd,* July 2, 2025, on the katechon and the Girard quotation. https://unherd.com/2025/07/who-is-peter-thiels-antichrist/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Altman.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Altman.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..03a7fefb --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Altman.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - SamAltman + - OpenAI + - YCombinator + - ArtificialIntelligence + - SiliconValley + - Worldcoin +summary: "Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who led Y Combinator, cofounded and runs OpenAI, launched the iris-scanning identity project Worldcoin, and was briefly fired and reinstated as OpenAI chief executive in the November 2023 board crisis." +born: 1985-04-22 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Sam Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor who cofounded and leads [[OpenAI]], the company at the center of the generative-AI era. A [[Stanford University]] dropout, he founded the location startup [[Loopt]] in the first [[Y Combinator]] batch in 2005, ran Y Combinator as president from 2014 to 2019, and cofounded OpenAI with [[Elon Musk]] in 2015. His career runs through the same [[Silicon Valley]] founder network as [[Peter Thiel]], who was a part-time partner at Y Combinator during Altman's presidency.[^1][^2] + +### Y Combinator and OpenAI + +Altman became president of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, in 2014 and expanded it into research and large-scale funding before leaving in 2019 to focus on OpenAI, where he became chief executive when the organization created its capped-profit structure and took a [[Microsoft]] investment. Under Altman, OpenAI released [[ChatGPT]] in 2022 and became the most prominent AI company in the world.[^2][^3] + +Altman's first company, Loopt, raised about 30 million dollars and was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation in March 2012 for 43.4 million dollars after failing to gain traction. At Y Combinator he widened the accelerator's reach, launched the YC Research arm in 2015 (which seeded OpenAI), and pushed into late-stage funding. He took no salary as OpenAI chief executive and held no equity in the company, an arrangement he cited as evidence of disinterested motives during the 2023 board fight, though he holds stakes through OpenAI's startup fund and across a wide personal portfolio. In the 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI's for-profit arm into a public-benefit corporation valued at 500 billion dollars, Altman remained chief executive without a founder's equity grant of the kind common at companies of that scale.[^2][^6] + +### The 2023 Firing and Reinstatement + +On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman, saying he had not been "consistently candid"; the directors included [[Ilya Sutskever]], [[Helen Toner]], and [[Tasha McCauley]], the latter two tied to the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and the dispute turned on the pace of AI commercialization. After roughly 700 employees threatened to resign and Microsoft offered to hire him, Altman was reinstated within days under a reconstituted board. The episode positioned Altman and the commercial wing against the effective-altruism and AI-safety faction that had grown out of the [[Rationalist Community]].[^3][^4] + +Microsoft chief executive [[Satya Nadella]] announced on November 20, 2023 that Altman and [[Greg Brockman]] would lead a new advanced-research lab inside Microsoft, a threat that gave Microsoft leverage and the staff a destination if the board held firm. The reconstituted board that returned Altman was chaired by [[Bret Taylor]] and added [[Larry Summers]], while Sutskever, McCauley, and Toner departed. In May 2024 Toner gave a public account alleging the board learned of ChatGPT's launch from Twitter rather than from Altman and that he had withheld his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund, claims Altman's allies disputed. A later law-firm review commissioned by the new board found the prior board's concerns did not warrant his removal.[^3][^4] + +### Worldcoin and Other Ventures + +In 2019 Altman cofounded Worldcoin (operated by [[Tools for Humanity]]), a project that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to create a global proof-of-personhood identity tied to a cryptocurrency, which drew regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries over its biometric data collection. Altman has also funded longevity, nuclear-fusion, and biotechnology ventures, the same frontier-technology categories favored across the Thiel network.[^5] + +Worldcoin raised about 115 million dollars from Blockchain Capital in 2023, with [[Andreessen Horowitz]]'s a16z Crypto and Bain Capital Crypto among earlier backers, and offered users 25 free WLD tokens for an iris scan. Regulators moved against it across multiple jurisdictions: Kenya suspended its operations in August 2023 over data-misuse fears and a court later ordered the deletion of Kenyans' biometric data, and Spain's data-protection authority used emergency [[General Data Protection Regulation|GDPR]] powers in March 2024 to suspend the project for up to three months. Among Altman's other ventures, he was chairman of and an early investor in the nuclear-fission firm Oklo, which he took public in 2024 through his SPAC AltC Acquisition Corp before stepping down as chair in 2025; he led a 500-million-dollar round in the fusion company Helion Energy in 2021; and he supplied the entire 180-million-dollar seed round of the longevity startup Retro Biosciences out of his own money, a stake revealed by MIT Technology Review in March 2023.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Altman and Musk launched OpenAI as a nonprofit 10 years ago. Now they're rivals," *CNBC,* December 11, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/openai-began-decade-ago-as-nonprofit-lab-musk-and-altman-now-rivals.html +[^2]: "The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI's bid to save the world," *MIT Technology Review,* February 17, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ +[^3]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained +[^4]: "What the chaos at OpenAI says about the future of the industry," *Columbia Journalism Review,* 2023. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/openai_sam_altman_ouster.php +[^5]: "Worldcoin and Tools for Humanity," on the iris-scanning identity project and its regulatory scrutiny; contemporaneous press coverage, 2023 onward; "Kenya suspends Worldcoin scans over security, privacy and financial concerns," *TechCrunch,* August 2, 2023, and "Worldcoin hit with temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns," *TechCrunch,* March 6, 2024. +[^6]: "Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death," *MIT Technology Review,* March 8, 2023; "Sam Altman takes nuclear startup Oklo public to power AI ambitions," *CNBC,* May 10, 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altman-investment-180-million-retro-biosciences-longevity-death/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Bankman-Fried.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Bankman-Fried.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0353b547 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Sam Bankman-Fried.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - SamBankmanFried + - FTX + - EffectiveAltruism + - Fraud + - Cryptocurrency +alias: + - SBF +summary: "Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the effective-altruism movement's largest benefactor, who directed FTX customer funds into longtermist causes and a 500 million dollar Anthropic investment before FTX collapsed in 2022 and he was convicted of fraud in 2023." +born: 1992-03-06 +location: "Palo Alto, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Sam Bankman-Fried (born March 6, 1992) is an American entrepreneur who founded the trading firm [[Alameda Research]] and the [[FTX]] cryptocurrency exchange and who became the largest single funder of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement before his businesses collapsed in fraud. A physics graduate of the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] and a former [[Jane Street Capital]] trader, he was recruited into the "earning to give" branch of effective altruism by the philosopher [[William MacAskill]] and built his fortune as a vehicle for longtermist philanthropy. He was convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023.[^1][^2] + +### FTX and Effective-Altruism Funding + +Bankman-Fried launched Alameda Research in 2017 and FTX in 2019, accumulating a paper fortune that briefly exceeded twenty billion dollars. Through the [[FTX Future Fund]], announced in 2022, he directed money toward effective-altruism and longtermist causes, with AI existential risk and pandemic preparedness at the top of its priorities, channeling funds to the same research community around the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] and the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] that Oxford academic longtermism and the [[Rationalist Community]] had built. In 2022 he invested approximately 500 million dollars of FTX-derived capital in [[Anthropic]], the AI-safety company founded by former [[OpenAI]] researchers.[^2][^3] + +The Future Fund launched in February 2022, run by [[Nick Beckstead]], [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], Avital Balwit, MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan, and stated it aimed to distribute at least 100 million dollars that year and potentially up to a billion. It ran a regranting program that handed discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers and committed roughly 160 million dollars across about 260 grants before FTX collapsed nine months later, leaving many recipients facing clawback demands from the bankruptcy estate. Bankman-Fried also became a major political donor, giving about 40 million dollars to mostly Democratic candidates and committees in the 2022 cycle and later admitting to a parallel stream of "dark" donations to Republicans, money that prosecutors charged was drawn from FTX customer funds.[^5][^6] + +### The Collapse and Conviction + +FTX collapsed in November 2022 when it could not meet customer withdrawals, revealing that roughly eight billion dollars in customer deposits had been diverted to Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried was arrested, extradited, and tried in the Southern District of New York, where a jury convicted him on November 2, 2023; he was sentenced in March 2024 to twenty-five years in prison. The fraud destroyed the effective-altruism movement's largest funding source and discredited its public standing, accelerating the distancing from the label by figures including Anthropic's [[Dario Amodei]] and contributing to the climate in which the Future of Humanity Institute was closed.[^1][^4] + +Judge Lewis Kaplan handed down the sentence on March 28, 2024 and ordered forfeiture of 11.02 billion dollars; prosecutors had sought 40 to 50 years against a statutory maximum of 110, while the defense had argued for about six and a half. Several of his closest associates pleaded guilty and testified against him, including Alameda chief [[Caroline Ellison]], FTX cofounder [[Gary Wang]], and engineering head [[Nishad Singh]]. The bankruptcy estate, led by restructuring executive [[John J. Ray III]], recovered enough through asset sales (including the Anthropic stake and a rebound in crypto prices) to plan repayment of creditors at full claim value plus interest, while pursuing clawbacks against grant recipients; the effective-altruism umbrella body [[Effective Ventures]] returned 26,786,503 dollars to the estate in 2024, the full sum it had received from FTX.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, November 2, 2023; sentencing March 2024. +[^2]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/ +[^3]: "From 500 million to 30 billion: SBF, in prison, has invested in the most valuable company in the AI era," on the Anthropic investment via Alameda. https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/019d08f7-792c-70db-a0d3-5654dd2b2eaf +[^4]: "What Happens Now to Effective Altruism, SBF's Pet Philosophy?" 2023. https://www.aol.com/happens-now-effective-altruism-sbfs-130000997.html +[^5]: "Announcing the Future Fund," FTX Future Fund, February 2022, on the leadership, the 100-million-to-1-billion target, and the regranting program. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2mx6xrDrwiEKzfgks/announcing-the-future-fund-1 +[^6]: "Sam Bankman-Fried donated over $40 million in the 2022 election cycle. Where did it go?" *CBS News,* on the Democratic giving and the "dark" Republican donations. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-political-donations-2022/ +[^7]: "Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in federal prison," *CNN,* March 28, 2024, on the sentence, the 11.02-billion-dollar forfeiture, and the sentencing range. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/28/business/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sentencing +[^8]: "Effective Ventures Settles $26.8M FTX Donations Case," *The Crypto Times,* January 31, 2024, on the 26,786,503-dollar repayment to the FTX estate. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/01/31/effective-ventures-settles-26-8m-ftx-donations-case/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Alexander.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Alexander.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..528bae36 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Alexander.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - ScottAlexander + - Rationalism + - SlateStarCodex + - Neoreaction + - Media +summary: "Scott Alexander is the pen name of psychiatrist Scott Siskind, whose blog Slate Star Codex became the central forum of the rationalist movement after LessWrong, who deleted it in 2020 over a New York Times piece that named him, and whose privately expressed openness to 'human biodiversity' and neoreactionary ideas was exposed by a leaked 2014 email." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Scott Alexander is the pen name of [[Scott Siskind]], a [[San Francisco Bay Area]] psychiatrist whose blog Slate Star Codex became the most widely read forum of the [[Rationalist Community]] after [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s [[LessWrong]]. The blog's long essays on psychiatry, statistics, and politics made it required reading across the rationalist, [[Effective Altruism]], and Silicon Valley technology worlds in the 2010s. Alexander deleted the blog in 2020 ahead of a [[The New York Times|New York Times]] article that would publish his legal name, and his privately expressed sympathy for [[Human Biodiversity|human biodiversity]] and his engagement with [[Neoreaction]] were exposed through a leaked 2014 email.[^1][^2] + +### Slate Star Codex + +Alexander launched Slate Star Codex in 2013. The blog served as the discursive center of the rationalist subculture and a venue where heterodox and reactionary ideas were debated at length, including a 2013 "Anti-Reactionary FAQ" that argued against the [[Curtis Yarvin|Moldbug]] neoreactionary program while treating it as a serious intellectual object. The comment sections and the associated meetups linked the rationalist community to the wider tech-right ecosystem, and the blog's audience overlapped with the effective-altruism movement and the AI-risk community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]].[^1][^3] + +Its widely circulated essays included "Meditations on Moloch" (2014), a parable about coordination failure that became a reference point in the AI-safety community, and "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" (2014). The blog's Silicon Valley readership was substantial: it carried an endorsement from [[Paul Graham]] of [[Y Combinator]], was read by [[Patrick Collison]] of [[Stripe]], and was followed by the venture capitalists [[Marc Andreessen]] and [[Ben Horowitz]], while [[Sam Altman]] of [[OpenAI]] called it essential reading among "the people inventing the future."[^6][^7] + +### The 2020 Deletion and the New York Times Article + +In June 2020 Alexander deleted Slate Star Codex after learning that a New York Times technology reporter, [[Cade Metz]], was preparing an article that would identify him by his full name. Alexander said disclosure would endanger his psychiatric practice and patients and cited prior threats. The article, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space," appeared on February 13, 2021, naming Siskind and connecting the blog and its community to figures including the social scientist [[Charles Murray]] and to neoreactionary currents; it drew heavy criticism within and beyond the rationalist community over the naming decision. Alexander relaunched in January 2021 as the Substack publication [[Astral Codex Ten]].[^2][^4] + +Alexander took the blog down on June 23, 2020, replacing it with a post headlined "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog." A petition asking the *Times* to respect his pseudonymity gathered roughly 8,000 signatures, including that of the computer scientist [[Scott Aaronson]]. The relaunched Astral Codex Ten, opened January 21, 2021 on Substack with the post "Still Alive," drew thousands of paid subscribers and made Alexander one of the platform's signature writers; the migration mirrored the broader movement of heterodox commentators, including [[Sam Harris]] and [[Bari Weiss]], onto direct-subscription platforms after disputes with mainstream outlets.[^4][^8] + +### The Leaked 2014 Email + +In February 2021, around the time of the Times article, [[Topher Brennan]] published a 2014 private email from Alexander. In it Alexander wrote that he had learned from neoreactionary writers and that "human biodiversity" (HBD), the term used for claims of genetically based racial differences in intelligence, was "probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct," while asking that his openness to such ideas not be made public. The email documented a private alignment more sympathetic to race science and reaction than his published critiques of neoreaction had indicated.[^5] + +In the email Alexander described the neoreactionaries as "almost the only people" engaging seriously with what he framed as the underlying problems of racial difference and immigration, and wrote that they "provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them." He warned the recipient that if his actual views were disclosed he would "probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge." Critics read the message as evidence that the published "Anti-Reactionary FAQ" had functioned as a respectable shell that drew rationalist readers toward Moldbug's ideas while letting Alexander disavow them; defenders treated it as a decade-old private message taken out of context. The leak landed in the same news cycle as the Cade Metz article, compounding the rationalist community's sense of exposure.[^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Slate Star Codex" and Scott Alexander's writing, 2013 to 2020; the "Anti-Reactionary FAQ," 2013. Contemporaneous rationalist-community record. +[^2]: "The Slate Star Codex 'Doxxing' Is the Latest Squabble Inside New York Times," *The Daily Beast,* June 2020. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times/ +[^3]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism," *Jacobin,* January 2023, on the rationalist-to-effective-altruism overlap. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism +[^4]: "What the New York Times' Hit Piece on Slate Star Codex Says About Media Gatekeeping," *Reason,* February 15, 2021. https://reason.com/2021/02/15/what-the-new-york-times-hit-piece-on-slate-star-codex-says-about-media-gatekeeping/ +[^5]: "The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer," archiving the 2014 email published by Topher Brennan in February 2021, with the "vast stream of garbage" and "horrible revenge" quotes; treated as a leaked-document source. https://gist.github.com/segyges/f540a3dadeb42f49c0b0ab4244e43a55 +[^6]: Alexander, Scott. "Meditations on Moloch" and "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup," *Slate Star Codex,* 2014. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ +[^7]: "Why Slate Star Codex is Silicon Valley's safe space," and Cade Metz, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space," *The New York Times,* February 13, 2021, on the Graham endorsement and the Collison, Andreessen, Horowitz, and Altman readership. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html +[^8]: Alexander, Scott. "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog," June 23, 2020, and "Still Alive," *Astral Codex Ten,* January 21, 2021; "Well-Known Blogger Shuts Down Site for Fear of NYT 'Doxxing,'" *Washington Free Beacon,* on the roughly 8,000-signature petition. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Belsky.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Belsky.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3b7f959e --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Scott Belsky.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - ScottBelsky + - Behance + - Adobe + - A24 + - VentureCapital + - Design +alias: + - Scott Belsky +summary: "Scott Belsky is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Behance, sold it to Adobe in 2012 and rose to Adobe chief strategy officer, invested early in Uber, Pinterest, and Warby Parker, and became a partner at the film studio A24 in 2025." +born: 1980 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Scott Belsky (born 1980) is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded the creative-portfolio platform [[Behance|Behance]], sold it to [[Adobe|Adobe]] in 2012 and rose to chief strategy officer there, made early angel investments in Uber, Pinterest, and Warby Parker, and became a partner at the film studio [[A24|A24]] in 2025. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026, which identified him as a partner at A24 and a former Adobe chief strategy and chief product officer.[^1] + +### Behance and 99U + +Belsky took a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 2002 and an MBA from Harvard Business School, working at Goldman Sachs before founding Behance in 2006 with the designer Matías Corea. Behance built an online portfolio network for creative professionals, and Belsky paired it with the 99U conference, launched in 2009 and "devoted to the execution of ideas," and the Action Method, a productivity system and line of organizational products. The company raised a single outside round, a 6.5 million dollar Series A in May 2012, with investors including Union Square Ventures and Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions.[^2][^3] + +The 99U brand and the *Making Ideas Happen* and *The Messy Middle* books extended Belsky's name beyond the product into the productivity-and-creativity commentary that accompanied his investing.[^4][^5] + +### The Adobe Acquisition and the Chief Strategy Role + +Adobe announced its acquisition of Behance on December 20, 2012, in a deal that TechCrunch reported at slightly more than 150 million dollars in cash and stock plus multi-year earnouts; Adobe never officially disclosed the figure, and the 150 million dollar number is a press estimate. Belsky joined Adobe as vice president of community, overseeing Behance. He left in February 2016 to join the venture firm Benchmark, announced as its sixth general partner by [[Bill Gurley|Bill Gurley]], then stepped back to a venture-partner role that September, telling *Fortune* he could not see himself "as a VC for the next ten years in the traditional sense."[^3][^6][^7] + +Belsky returned to Adobe in December 2017 as chief product officer and executive vice president of Creative Cloud, leading product and engineering across the Creative Cloud applications. He was promoted around March 2023 to chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products. During this period Adobe launched the generative-artificial-intelligence model Firefly in beta in March 2023, and Belsky publicly championed the company's generative-AI push. He announced his departure from Adobe in January 2025, with a last day in March 2025, remaining an adviser to the company.[^8][^9] + +### Venture Investing + +Belsky's angel and venture investments confirmed in contemporaneous press include early positions in Uber, Pinterest, Warby Parker, and the live-streaming app Periscope. He operates an angel vehicle and writes the *Implications* newsletter on technology and creativity rather than running a named fund. His Benchmark stint in 2016 placed him among a partner group that included Gurley, Peter Fenton, and Matt Cohler, and his investing has continued alongside his operating roles; a February 2026 round in the accounting-software company Basis named him as a co-investor alongside Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and the Box cofounder [[Aaron Levie|Aaron Levie]].[^6][^10] + +Belsky was an early advocate within Adobe for non-fungible-token and web3 features, championing the "Prepare as NFT" and Content Credentials tools announced at Adobe MAX in October 2021. He later argued, in a March 2023 interview, that generative artificial intelligence would succeed in the creative market where web3 had failed because web3 "added more friction."[^11] + +### A24 + +Belsky joined the film and entertainment studio A24 as a partner leading technology and innovation, founding A24 Labs, in an arrangement announced January 30, 2025, with a start around March 2025. A24 is the studio behind *Moonlight,* *Hereditary,* and *Everything Everywhere All at Once.* Reporting uniformly describes Belsky as a partner and operating executive rather than a funding-round investor or board member; he is not named in A24's financing rounds. A24 raised 225 million dollars at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation in 2022 in a round led by Stripes, and raised a further round in 2024 led by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital at a 3.5 billion dollar valuation, neither of which included Belsky.[^12][^13] + +Belsky also holds a confirmed corporate board seat at the software company [[Atlassian|Atlassian]], effective August 1, 2024.[^12][^14] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Frustration fuels creation for design industry innovator Scott Belsky '02." Cornell University alumni profile. https://alumni.cornell.edu/profile/frustration-fuels-creation-for-design-industry-innovator-scott-belsky-02 +[^3]: "Adobe acquired portfolio service Behance for more than 150 million dollars in cash and stock." *TechCrunch,* December 21, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/adobe-acquired-portfolio-service-behance-for-more-than-150-million-in-cash-and-stock/ +[^4]: Belsky, Scott. *Making Ideas Happen.* Portfolio (Penguin), 2010. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305198/making-ideas-happen-by-scott-belsky/ +[^5]: Belsky, Scott. *The Messy Middle.* Portfolio (Penguin), 2018. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557330/the-messy-middle-by-scott-belsky/ +[^6]: "Benchmark adds a sixth general partner, Scott Belsky." *TechCrunch,* February 8, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/08/benchmark-adds-a-sixth-general-partner-scott-belsky/ +[^7]: "Scott Belsky is no longer a full partner with Benchmark." *Fortune,* September 7, 2016. https://fortune.com/2016/09/07/scott-belsky-is-no-longer-a-full-partner-with-benchmark/ +[^8]: "Adobe unveils Firefly, a family of new creative generative AI." Adobe news, March 21, 2023. https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/adobe-unveils-firefly-a-family-of-new-creative-generative-ai +[^9]: "Scott Belsky departs Adobe for A24." *Variety,* January 30, 2025. https://variety.com/2025/film/news/scott-belsky-a24-adobe-1236291763/ +[^10]: "Basis raises 100 million dollars at 1.15 billion dollar valuation." Business Wire, February 24, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260224020999/en/ +[^11]: "Adobe's Scott Belsky talks generative AI and why it's not going to end up like web3." *TechCrunch,* March 2, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/adobes-scott-belsky-talks-generative-ai-and-why-its-not-going-to-end-up-like-web3/ +[^12]: "A24 hires Adobe chief strategy officer Scott Belsky for technology and innovation." *Deadline,* January 30, 2025. https://deadline.com/2025/01/a24-adobe-chief-strategy-officer-scott-belsky-technology-innovation-1236273665/ +[^13]: "A24 raises new funding at 3.5 billion dollar valuation led by Thrive Capital." *Variety,* June 2024. +[^14]: "Atlassian appoints Scott Belsky to board of directors." Business Wire, July 24, 2024. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240724227960/en/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Steve Bannon.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Steve Bannon.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..36bec6ec --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Steve Bannon.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - SteveBannon + - Breitbart + - CambridgeAnalytica + - Trump + - Mercer + - AltRight + - 2016 +alias: + - Stephen K. Bannon +summary: "Steve Bannon is an American media executive and political strategist who served as executive chairman of Breitbart News, vice president of Cambridge Analytica, chief executive of the 2016 Trump campaign from August 2016, and White House Chief Strategist from January to August 2017, funded throughout by the Mercer family alongside the Thiel-aligned political infrastructure." +born: 1953-11-27 +location: "Norfolk, Virginia (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +[[Steve Bannon|Steve Bannon]] (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive and political strategist who served as executive chairman of [[Breitbart News|Breitbart News]] from 2012 (after founder [[Andrew Breitbart|Andrew Breitbart]]'s death) through 2016 and again 2017-2018, as vice president and secretary of [[Cambridge Analytica|Cambridge Analytica]] from June 2014 to August 2016, as chief executive of the [[Donald Trump|Trump]] 2016 presidential campaign from August 17, 2016, and as White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President from January 20 to August 18, 2017. The [[Mercer family|Mercer family]] funded Breitbart, bankrolled Cambridge Analytica, and was instrumental in installing Bannon as Trump campaign CEO.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Breitbart and the Mercer Funding + +Bannon took over Breitbart News after Andrew Breitbart's death in 2012. [[Robert Mercer|Robert Mercer]] and his daughter [[Rebekah Mercer|Rebekah Mercer]] were the primary funders of Breitbart during Bannon's tenure, providing the financial base for the outlet's expansion as the media backbone of the [[alt-right|alt-right]] and the emerging Trump coalition. Bannon's Breitbart published the coverage that amplified the [[Gamergate|Gamergate]] campaign's targets and framed the consumer-revolt narrative. The Breitbart-Gamergate pipeline was the channel through which the [[4chan|4chan]] / [[8chan|8chan]] imageboard culture entered mainstream conservative media.[^1][^4] + +Mercer's entry was an investment of about 10 million dollars made in June 2011, before Andrew Breitbart's death, in exchange for a stake in the company; Bannon assumed the executive chairmanship of the firm and of the family's broader political vehicles when Breitbart died in March 2012.[^6] The same year, Bannon co-founded the [[Government Accountability Institute|Government Accountability Institute]] with [[Peter Schweizer|Peter Schweizer]], a Tallahassee-based opposition-research nonprofit that the Mercer Family Foundation funded with more than half its 2013-2015 budget; the Institute produced Schweizer's 2015 book *Clinton Cash*, whose findings were placed with the *New York Times* and *Washington Post* and used to drive negative coverage of [[Hillary Clinton|Hillary Clinton]] ahead of the 2016 race.[^6] The 2017 Paradise Papers later showed Mercer routing political money through offshore accounts to build a war chest reported at roughly 60 million dollars for conservative causes including Breitbart and the Institute.[^6] + +### Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook Data Harvesting + +Bannon served as vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica from June 2014 to August 2016. The [[Guardian|Guardian]] reporting (March 2018), based on the whistleblower [[Christopher Wylie|Christopher Wylie]] disclosures, documented that Bannon oversaw the firm's Facebook data-harvesting project that acquired data on up to 87 million Facebook users through the [[Aleksandr Kogan|Aleksandr Kogan]] academic-researcher channel. The data was used for psychographic profiling of voters in the 2016 Trump campaign. Mercer provided approximately 15 million dollars in Cambridge Analytica funding. [[Jane Mayer|Jane Mayer]]'s *[[The New Yorker|New Yorker]]* reporting documented Bannon's involvement in Cambridge Analytica's [[Brexit|Brexit]]-related activities before he formally joined the Trump campaign.[^2][^5] + +The firm was created in 2013 as a U.S.-facing spin-off of the British military-contracting firm SCL Group, after its chief executive [[Alexander Nix|Alexander Nix]] met the Mercers aboard the family's yacht with Bannon present; Mercer agreed to the roughly 15 million dollar stake, Bannon was given the company name (a nod to the Cambridge academics Nix was recruiting) and a board seat as vice president.[^7] Testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 16, 2018, Wylie said Bannon had engaged SCL, "a foreign military contractor," to build "an arsenal of informational weapons" he could deploy on the American population because he "saw cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics," and that the firm tested 2014 slogans later used in the Trump campaign and discussed voter-suppression messaging aimed at Black voters.[^7] The harvested data originated in a personality-quiz app built by Kogan, whose firm Global Science Research passed the resulting profiles to Cambridge Analytica in breach of Facebook's platform terms, the disclosure that drove Facebook's stock down and produced a 5 billion dollar U.S. Federal Trade Commission settlement in 2019.[^2] + +### The 2016 Trump Campaign and the White House + +Bannon joined the Trump campaign as chief executive on August 17, 2016, replacing [[Paul Manafort|Paul Manafort]] at the top of the organizational chart, alongside [[Kellyanne Conway|Kellyanne Conway]] as campaign manager. Rebekah Mercer was reportedly instrumental in installing Bannon. After the election, Bannon received the newly created role of White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor, and a seat on the [[National Security Council|National Security Council]]'s Principals Committee (later removed). Trump fired Bannon on August 18, 2017, after the [[Charlottesville|Charlottesville]] "Unite the Right" violence and the documented tensions within the White House staff.[^1][^3] + +The Mercers had moved their support from [[Ted Cruz|Ted Cruz]] to Trump after the primaries, repurposing their pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise I (seeded with an 11 million dollar Robert Mercer contribution) into the anti-Clinton vehicle Make America Number 1, informally "Defeat Crooked Hillary," run by Rebekah Mercer, so that Bannon's August 2016 elevation brought the campaign both his Breitbart apparatus and the Mercer money in one move, a transition Joshua Green's *Devil's Bargain* (Penguin Press, 2017) reconstructed from interviews as the culmination of Bannon's years-long project to destroy Clinton.[^8] In the White House, Bannon was placed on the NSC Principals Committee by the January 28, 2017 reorganization in part, per a White House official, to monitor first national security adviser [[Michael Flynn|Michael Flynn]]; after Flynn's resignation and the arrival of [[H.R. McMaster|H.R. McMaster]], McMaster's restructuring removed Bannon from the committee on April 5, 2017 and restored the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as regular attendees.[^9] Bannon's August 18, 2017 firing came two days after an August 16 interview with Robert Kuttner of *The American Prospect*, which Bannon's associates said he had not understood to be on the record, in which he declared "there's no military solution" to North Korea and disparaged White House and State Department colleagues, compounding the post-Charlottesville friction.[^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Bannon's Breitbart tenure and the Mercer funding, see the contemporaneous press (*New York Times*, *Washington Post*) and Jane Mayer's *Dark Money*. +[^2]: "Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach." *The Guardian,* March 17, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election +[^3]: For the 2016 campaign CEO role and the White House Chief Strategist tenure, see the contemporaneous press coverage. +[^4]: For the Breitbart-Gamergate pipeline, see the Gamergate page. +[^5]: Mayer, Jane. "New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica's Role in Brexit." *The New Yorker.* +[^6]: "The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a populist power base was funded and built." *Washington Post.* https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/mercer-bannon/ . For the June 2011 10 million dollar Breitbart investment, the Government Accountability Institute funding, and the *Clinton Cash* placement, see also "Steve Bannon used Robert Mercer's offshore millions to accuse Clinton of corruption." *ThinkProgress,* November 8, 2017. +[^7]: "Christopher Wylie: Bannon wanted 'weapons' to fight a 'culture war' at Cambridge Analytica," testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, May 16, 2018. *CBS News.* https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/senate-cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-live-stream-updates-today-2018-05-16 ; and "How Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to further his alt-right vision for America." *CNN,* March 30, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/30/politics/bannon-cambridge-analytica +[^8]: Green, Joshua. *Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.* Penguin Press, 2017. For the Make America Number 1 / Keep the Promise I super PAC and the Mercer contribution, see "Make America Number 1." *Ballotpedia.* https://ballotpedia.org/Make_America_Number_1 +[^9]: "Stephen Bannon removed from National Security Council." *Washington Post,* April 5, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/05/steven-bannon-no-longer-a-member-of-national-security-council/ ; Kuttner, Robert. "Steve Bannon, Unrepentant." *The American Prospect,* August 16, 2017. https://prospect.org/2017/08/16/steve-bannon-unrepentant/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Stewart Brand.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Stewart Brand.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1e6a83d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Stewart Brand.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Authors & Journalists" +tags: + - Person + - StewartBrand + - WholeEarthCatalog + - Counterculture + - Cyberculture + - LongNow + - Cybernetics +alias: + - Stewart Brand +summary: "Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation, the figure who carried 1960s counterculture into Silicon Valley tech-utopianism." +born: 1938 +location: "California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, editor, and impresario who founded the *Whole Earth Catalog* in 1968, the online community the WELL in 1985, the corporate consultancy the Global Business Network in 1987, and the Long Now Foundation in 1996. A Stanford-trained biologist, Merry Prankster, and organizer of Ken Kesey's Trips Festival, he is the figure most often credited with carrying the values of the 1960s San Francisco counterculture, communalism, personal liberation, and a faith in "tools," into the personal-computer and internet culture of Silicon Valley, a passage documented by [[Fred Turner]] in *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism* (2006).[^1][^2] + +### From the Counterculture to the Whole Earth Catalog + +Brand graduated in biology from Stanford University in 1960, studying under the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, and served as a U.S. Army infantry officer. In the mid-1960s he joined Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, helped stage the Acid Tests, and produced the three-day Trips Festival in San Francisco in January 1966. In 1966 he ran a public campaign asking why no photograph of the whole Earth from space had yet been published, selling buttons that read "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"; he put a NASA image of the planet on the cover when he launched the *Whole Earth Catalog* in the autumn of 1968.[^1][^2] + +The *Whole Earth Catalog*, subtitled "Access to Tools" and published from 1968 to 1972 with occasional later editions, was a large-format compendium reviewing books, machines, and ideas for self-sufficient living, organized under headings that began with "Whole Systems," cybernetics, and general systems theory. It opened with the line "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," won the National Book Award in 1972, and became, in Turner's account, a template for a decentralized, tool-using community that later technologists adopted. [[Steve Jobs]] took the farewell line on the back cover of the October 1974 edition, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish," as the closing exhortation of his 2005 Stanford commencement address. Brand also assisted [[Douglas Engelbart]] in staging the December 9, 1968 demonstration in San Francisco later called "the Mother of All Demos," which premiered the mouse, hypertext, and windowed computing.[^2][^3] + +### The WELL, Global Business Network, and Digital Utopianism + +In 1985 Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL, a dial-up teleconferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay Area that became one of the most influential early online communities and a seedbed of internet culture and the digital-rights movement; the writer Howard Rheingold drew his 1993 book *The Virtual Community* from it. Brand had earlier coined or popularized the slogan "Information wants to be free" at the 1984 Hackers Conference, which he helped organize, capturing the tension he described between information's wanting to be expensive and wanting to be free.[^1][^4] + +In 1987 Brand co-founded the Global Business Network in Berkeley with the futurist Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson, a consultancy that brought the technique of scenario planning, developed earlier at Royal Dutch Shell, to corporations and governments and that linked countercultural futurism to corporate strategy. Through these ventures and his magazine *CoEvolution Quarterly*, Brand moved in the circles that produced *Wired* magazine and the Bay Area's networked-economy boosters of the 1990s, and Turner's history identifies him as the connective figure between the New Communalist counterculture and the libertarian techno-utopianism of that decade.[^4][^5] + +### The Long Now Foundation and Long-Term Thinking + +In 1996 Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation with the computer scientist Danny Hillis and the musician Brian Eno to promote what they called "long-term thinking" across a horizon of ten thousand years; Eno coined the name to evoke a "long now" set against the short now of quarterly and weekly time. Its flagship project is the Clock of the Long Now, a monument-scale mechanical clock designed by Hillis to keep time for ten thousand years, a prototype of which is under construction inside a mountain in West Texas on land owned by [[Jeff Bezos]], who funded the build. Brand set out the rationale in *The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility* (1999).[^6] + +Brand's later projects extended the foundation's long-horizon framing into biotechnology and environmental politics. He co-founded Revive & Restore, a Long Now project pursuing the genetic "de-extinction" of species such as the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth, and in *Whole Earth Discipline* (2009) he argued for nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering as environmental tools, declaring again that "we are as gods and have to get good at it."[^1][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Stewart Brand," Long Now Foundation people page, on his Stanford biology degree, Army service, the *Whole Earth Catalog*, the WELL, the Hackers Conference, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation, the Clock of the Long Now, Revive & Restore, the Pace Layers framework, and his books. https://longnow.org/people/sb1/ +[^2]: Turner, Fred. *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.* University of Chicago Press, 2006; on Brand's path from the Merry Pranksters and Trips Festival through the *Whole Earth Catalog* to digital utopianism. +[^3]: "50 Years Ago, the Whole Earth Catalog Launched and Reinvented the Environmental Movement," *Smithsonian,* on the 1968 launch, the NASA whole-Earth cover, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," and the catalog's reach to hippies and technologists; and "Steve Jobs to 2005 Graduates: 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,'" Stanford Report, June 2005, on the back-cover quotation of the 1974 catalog. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/50-years-ago-whole-earth-catalog-launched-reinvented-environmental-movement-180969682/ +[^4]: "The Mother of All Demos," and contemporary accounts, on Brand's role assisting Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968 demonstration; and on the WELL (1985), Howard Rheingold's *The Virtual Community* (1993), and "Information wants to be free" from the 1984 Hackers Conference. +[^5]: "Global Business Network," on the 1987 founding in Berkeley by Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Stewart Brand, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson, and the firm's scenario-planning practice; and Schwartz, Peter. *The Art of the Long View.* 1991. +[^6]: Brand, Stewart. *The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility.* Basic Books, 1999; and Long Now Foundation, "The 10,000 Year Clock," on the 1996 founding with Danny Hillis and Brian Eno, Eno's naming, and the West Texas clock site on land owned by Jeff Bezos. https://longnow.org/clock/ +[^7]: Brand, Stewart. *Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.* Viking, 2009, on nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and "we are as gods and have to get good at it"; and Long Now Foundation, "Revive & Restore," on de-extinction of the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ted Cruz.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ted Cruz.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9f30a88e --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Ted Cruz.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - TedCruz + - RepublicanParty + - Texas + - Senate + - CambridgeAnalytica + - PeterThiel + - Dialog +alias: + - Rafael Edward Cruz + - Senator Ted Cruz +summary: "Ted Cruz is a U.S. Senator from Texas whose name appeared on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society, whose 2016 presidential campaign paid Cambridge Analytica more than 5.8 million dollars, and whose largest early backer was Peter Thiel." +born: 1970-12-22 +location: "Calgary, Alberta, Canada (born); Houston, Texas (political base)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz (born December 22, 1970, in [[Calgary]], [[Alberta]], [[Canada]]) is an American politician and lawyer who has served as a U.S. Senator from [[Texas]] since 2013. In June 2026 Cruz was named by *WIRED* among the figures surfaced in the leak of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]]. Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign was an early client of [[Cambridge Analytica]], the data firm financed by the Republican donor [[Robert Mercer]], and Thiel was among Cruz's largest financial backers in his early statewide campaigns.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Education, Solicitor General, and the Senate + +Cruz graduated from [[Princeton University]] in 1992 and earned a law degree from [[Harvard Law School]] in 1995. He clerked for Chief Justice [[William Rehnquist]], worked at the [[Federal Trade Commission]] and the [[Department of Justice]], and served as solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008, arguing cases before the [[Supreme Court of the United States|U.S. Supreme Court]]. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, taking office in January 2013, and was reelected in 2018 and 2024.[^4] + +Cruz built a national profile within the [[Republican Party]] as a confrontational conservative, leading the 2013 effort that produced a federal government shutdown over the [[Affordable Care Act]] and mounting a presidential campaign in 2016 in which he finished second to [[Donald Trump]] for the nomination. His Texas campaigns drew heavily on out-of-state conservative donor networks, including [[Club for Growth]] and the family of Robert Mercer.[^3][^4] + +### Peter Thiel's Early Donations + +Thiel was an early and substantial financial backer of Cruz. In 2009 Thiel gave 251,000 dollars to Cruz's aborted run for Texas attorney general, a sum reported as roughly nineteen percent of Cruz's fundraising for that campaign. In the 2012 Senate race Thiel contributed the individual maximum of 5,000 dollars directly to Cruz and gave one million dollars to the [[Club for Growth Action]] super PAC supporting him, the largest single contribution to that committee at the time.[^3] + +The relationship drew criticism inside Texas Republican politics because Thiel publicly supported same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, positions opposed to Cruz's platform. A spokesman for Cruz responded that "Ted's record of defending marriage between one man and one woman is as clear and unwavering as his commitment to reduce the size of government," while the campaign of his primary rival [[David Dewhurst]] called the donor relationship "hypocritical and deceitful." Cruz described Thiel as a friend.[^3] + +### Cambridge Analytica and the Mercer Network + +Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign was the first major American political operation to deploy Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics firm whose primary investor was the hedge-fund executive Robert Mercer and whose vice president was [[Steve Bannon]]. Federal Election Commission records show the Cruz campaign paid Cambridge Analytica more than 5.8 million dollars for data analysis and online advertising during the 2016 cycle, with an additional 570,000 dollars paid by the pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise II. Mercer donated approximately eleven million dollars to super PACs supporting Cruz's presidential bid.[^2][^5] + +The firm built psychographic voter profiles, dividing the electorate into psychological categories, work later tied to the harvesting of data from tens of millions of [[Facebook]] users. After Cruz dropped out in 2016, Mercer, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica shifted to the Trump campaign. When the [[Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal]] broke in March 2018, Cruz said the firm had assured his campaign its methods were legal: "Cambridge Analytica represented to the campaign that all data in their possession were legally obtained and that they were in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, and the campaign relied on those representations." His spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said the campaign had included explicit contractual language requiring lawful conduct.[^2][^5][^6] + +### The 2026 Dialog Leak + +The June 16, 2026 *WIRED* report identified Cruz on the Dialog roster as "U.S. Senator (R-TX)," listing him among the sitting senators of both parties surfaced when the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] located a member directory in the source code of Dialog's website and a separate source provided the publication with the 222-name registration list for the society's retreat near [[Dublin]], scheduled for August 12 through 16, 2026. *WIRED* placed Cruz alongside [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]] and Colorado governor [[Jared Polis]] among the political figures on the list.[^1] + +Cruz had received Thiel's financial backing in earlier cycles and has acknowledged a personal friendship with Thiel, the chairman of [[Palantir Technologies]] and cofounder of [[Founders Fund]].[^1][^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Before Trump, Cambridge Analytica was on team Cruz." *OpenSecrets,* March 2018. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/03/before-trump-cambridge-analytica-was-on-team-cruz +[^3]: "Cruz Mega-Donor is Gay, Pro-Pot Billionaire." *Texas Tribune,* July 3, 2012. https://www.texastribune.org/2012/07/03/ted-cruzs-gay-billionaire-donor-draws-criticism/ +[^4]: "CRUZ, Rafael Edward (Ted)." Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/C001098 +[^5]: "Cambridge Analytica Helped Ted Cruz Win Iowa But Now May Haunt His Reelection." *Texas Monthly,* 2018. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/cambridge-analytica-helped-ted-cruz-win-iowa-now-may-haunt-reelection/ +[^6]: "Ted Cruz says Cambridge Analytica told his presidential campaign its data use was legal." *Texas Tribune,* March 20, 2018. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/20/ted-cruz-campaign-cambridge-analytica/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Virginia Giuffre.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Virginia Giuffre.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7d28c1b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Virginia Giuffre.md @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: + - Person + - VirginiaGiuffre + - JeffreyEpstein + - GhislaineMaxwell + - PrinceAndrew + - SexTrafficking + - MaraLago +alias: + - Virginia Roberts + - Virginia Roberts Giuffre +summary: "Virginia Giuffre is a sex-trafficking survivor and advocate who said Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her at Mar-a-Lago around 2000 when she was a teenager and that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked her to others including Prince Andrew, who litigated against Maxwell and Andrew, and who died by suicide in Western Australia on April 25, 2025." +born: 1983-08-09 +died: 2025-04-25 +location: "Neergabby, Western Australia (died)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Virginia Giuffre, born Virginia Roberts on August 9, 1983, was an American-born sex-trafficking survivor and advocate who became one of the most prominent accusers of [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]] and [[Ghislaine Maxwell|Ghislaine Maxwell]]. She said that Maxwell recruited her around 2000, when she was a teenager working at [[Mar-a-Lago|Mar-a-Lago]], and that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to Epstein and to others, an account she set out in court filings, interviews, and a posthumous memoir. She later settled with Epstein, sued Maxwell for defamation, and sued [[Prince Andrew|Prince Andrew]]. She died by suicide at her property in [[Western Australia|Western Australia]] on April 25, 2025, at age 41. Her allegations are documented as her testimony; the individuals she named have denied wrongdoing where they responded.[^1][^2] + +### Early Life + +Giuffre was born Virginia Roberts on August 9, 1983, in Sacramento, California, to Sky and Lynn Roberts, and the family moved to Palm Beach County, Florida, when she was young, where her father later worked in a maintenance role at Mar-a-Lago. She described in interviews and in her memoir a childhood marked by sexual abuse beginning around age seven, repeated running away, periods living with relatives in California and in foster care, and time at a facility for troubled youth. She said that in the late 1990s, as a young teenager, she had been drawn into an earlier trafficking situation before returning to her family.[^1][^8] + +In the summer of 2000 Giuffre took a job as a locker-room attendant at the Mar-a-Lago spa, an arrangement she said was facilitated through her father's employment there. She was 16 or 17 at the time of her recruitment, and accounts vary on the precise age and date; her filings generally placed her recruitment around 2000.[^1][^8] + +### Recruitment and Trafficking Allegations + +Giuffre said that Ghislaine Maxwell approached her while she was working at the Mar-a-Lago spa, reading a book on massage therapy, and recruited her ostensibly to train as a masseuse for Epstein, taking her that evening to Epstein's nearby Palm Beach house. She said she was then drawn into sexual abuse by Epstein and trafficked to other men over a period of years, traveling among Epstein's residences in New York, Palm Beach, [[New Mexico|New Mexico]], and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and abroad. She described Maxwell as central to Epstein's operation and said she was presented to Epstein's associates as available for sexual purposes.[^1][^2] + +Among the men Giuffre said Epstein directed her to was Prince Andrew, whom she said she was made to have sex with on three occasions beginning in London in March 2001 when she was 17, around the time she was photographed with him at Maxwell's Belgravia home. Andrew has denied the allegations and settled her civil suit without admitting liability. Giuffre also named other men in her filings and interviews, including the financier [[Jean-Luc Brunel|Jean-Luc Brunel]] and the attorney [[Alan Dershowitz|Alan Dershowitz]]; those named denied her accounts. Her allegations against individuals other than Epstein and Maxwell were not adjudicated as criminal findings.[^2][^1] + +The body of allegations rests on Giuffre's sworn testimony, depositions, and statements rather than on criminal convictions of the men she named. Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 on federal sex-trafficking charges arising from the broader Epstein scheme, though that prosecution did not turn on Giuffre as a charged victim. Epstein was indicted federally in July 2019 and died in custody the following month before trial, his death ruled a suicide.[^2][^3] + +### Australia and Advocacy + +Giuffre said she left Epstein's circle around 2002 after he sent her abroad, including to Thailand to train in massage, where she met the Australian Robert Giuffre, whom she married and with whom she settled in [[Australia|Australia]] and raised three children, adopting the surname Giuffre. She lived for years in Western Australia, latterly on a property at Neergabby north of Perth.[^1] + +She became a public advocate for survivors of trafficking and sexual abuse, founding a nonprofit she initially called Victims Refuse Silence, later reorganized under the name Speak Out, Act, Reclaim, abbreviated SOAR. Her name and account featured in much of the reporting that drove renewed scrutiny of Epstein from the mid-2010s onward, including the work that culminated in his 2019 federal arrest.[^1] + +Through her advocacy and litigation Giuffre pressed for the public release of records in the Epstein matter and lent her name to campaigns supporting trafficking survivors. She cooperated with journalists and investigators over more than a decade, sitting for depositions and providing the photograph and other materials that entered the court record, and her sworn statements became part of the documentary record in multiple cases.[^1][^3] + +### Litigation + +Giuffre, then using the name Virginia Roberts, sued Epstein in 2009 in Florida, alleging abuse; that matter was resolved by a confidential settlement reported at 500,000 dollars and dismissed late that year. The settlement, unsealed on January 3, 2022, released Epstein and a category of unnamed "second parties" and "potential defendants," and its release language later became a contested issue in the suit against Prince Andrew, where Judge [[Lewis Kaplan|Lewis Kaplan]] held in January 2022 that the language was too ambiguous to clearly bar the claim against Andrew.[^4][^5] + +In September 2015 Giuffre sued Maxwell for defamation in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York|Southern District of New York]] after Maxwell, through a representative, publicly called her allegations lies. The case, [[Giuffre v. Maxwell|Giuffre v. Maxwell]], No. 15-cv-07433, produced a large body of depositions and exhibits, including testimony from [[Johanna Sjoberg|Johanna Sjoberg]] and others, and it settled in 2017 on undisclosed terms. Tranches of documents from that case were unsealed beginning in 2019, with a major release of formerly sealed exhibits in January 2024; reporting on the January 2024 unsealing noted it largely concerned already-known figures and contained no new criminal accusation against previously unnamed people.[^3] + +On August 9, 2021, Giuffre sued Prince Andrew in the same court under New York's Child Victims Act, alleging he sexually abused her on three occasions when she was 17. After Kaplan denied Andrew's motion to dismiss in January 2022, the suit settled in February 2022, the joint filing stating that Andrew would make "a substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights" and acknowledging her as "an established victim of abuse," with no admission of liability and the sum undisclosed.[^5] + +### Dershowitz Allegations + +Giuffre alleged in a 2014 court filing and subsequently that Epstein had trafficked her to the attorney Alan Dershowitz, who had been part of Epstein's legal defense team in Florida. Dershowitz denied the allegations from the outset, calling them fabricated and describing Giuffre at points as a liar, and the two sides litigated competing defamation claims. Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation in April 2019; Dershowitz countersued in November 2019.[^9] + +In November 2022 the parties, together with the attorney [[David Boies|David Boies]], reached a global settlement resolving the litigation. In her settlement statement Giuffre wrote: "I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations." She added that she "may have made a mistake" in identifying him. The agreement resolved all pending litigation without any payment from Dershowitz to Giuffre, and Dershowitz characterized the outcome as a vindication of his denials.[^9][^10] + +### Death and Memoir + +In late March 2025 Giuffre posted that she had been hospitalized in Western Australia after the vehicle she was in was struck by a school bus, writing in one social-media post that she had gone into renal failure and had been given "four days to live." Western Australia Police said no injuries were reported at the scene, and the bus driver and other parties disputed the severity she described; a source said she was not in a life-threatening condition. She left the hospital roughly a week later. Reporting on these contradictions circulated in early April 2025.[^6] + +Giuffre died by suicide on April 25, 2025, at her property in Neergabby, Western Australia, at age 41. Her family said in a statement that she "lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking" and that "the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia." Western Australia Police said her death was not being treated as suspicious. Her death came roughly a month after the bus incident and about six months before the scheduled publication of her memoir.[^2][^6] + +Her memoir [[Nobody's Girl|Nobody's Girl]], co-written with the author [[Amy Wallace|Amy Wallace]], was published posthumously by Alfred A. Knopf on October 21, 2025, following her stated wish that it appear regardless of her circumstances. The book recounts her account of recruitment at Mar-a-Lago, the years of trafficking, and the litigation that followed, and it repeats her allegations against Epstein, Maxwell, Andrew, and others. Its publication coincided with the renewed pressure on Andrew that preceded the removal of his titles, and it reached the top of bestseller lists in the weeks after release.[^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Virginia Giuffre," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Giuffre +[^2]: "Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein's most prominent abuse survivors, dies by suicide," *NBC News,* April 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/virginia-giuffre-one-jeffrey-epsteins-prominent-abuse-survivors-dies-s-rcna203027 +[^3]: Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), and unsealed exhibits, January 2024. https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Giuffre%20v.%20Maxwell,%20No.%20115-cv-07433%20(S.D.N.Y.%202015)/ +[^4]: "Billionaire's Alleged Sex Slave Settles Libel Case," *Courthouse News Service,* and reporting on the 2009 Epstein settlement. https://www.courthousenews.com/billionaires-alleged-sex-slave-settles-libel-case/ +[^5]: "Lawyers say settlement reached in Virginia Giuffre's lawsuit against Prince Andrew," *PBS NewsHour,* February 15, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lawyers-say-settlement-reached-in-virginia-giuffres-lawsuit-against-prince-andrew +[^6]: "Virginia Giuffre, prominent Jeffrey Epstein accuser, dies by suicide," *Yahoo News,* April 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/virginia-giuffre-prominent-jeffrey-epstein-015432265.html +[^7]: "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House, October 21, 2025. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712958/nobodys-girl-by-virginia-roberts-giuffre/ +[^8]: "Virginia Giuffre," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* 2025 (early life and recruitment). https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Giuffre +[^9]: "Virginia Giuffre drops allegations against Alan Dershowitz, saying she 'may have made a mistake,'" *CNN,* November 8, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/us/alan-dershowitz-virginia-giuffre-allegations-dropped +[^10]: "Epstein victim drops her lawsuit against lawyer Alan Dershowitz," *NBC News,* November 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/epstein-victim-drops-lawsuit-lawyer-alan-dershowitz-rcna56250 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Wei Dai.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Wei Dai.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..45e36afc --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Wei Dai.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - WeiDai + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - DigitalCash + - Bitcoin + - Rationalism +alias: + - Wei Dai +summary: "Wei Dai is a computer engineer who proposed the b-money digital-cash scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper, created the Crypto++ library, and posts in the rationalist community." +born: 1976 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Wei Dai is a computer engineer and cryptographer associated with the [[Cypherpunks]] movement who proposed "b-money," an early scheme for anonymous, government-resistant digital money that [[Satoshi Nakamoto]] cited as the first reference in the [[Bitcoin]] white paper. He created the Crypto++ open-source cryptography library and is an active participant in the [[Rationalist Community|rationalist community]] around [[LessWrong]].[^1][^2] + +### B-money + +Born in 1976 and educated in computer science with a mathematics minor at the [[University of Washington]], Dai published the b-money proposal on the cypherpunks mailing list in November 1998. It opened by crediting [[Timothy May]]'s crypto-anarchy, in which "the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary," and described "a scheme for a group of untraceable digital pseudonyms to pay each other with money and to enforce contracts amongst themselves without outside help."[^1][^3] + +The proposal set out two protocols. In the first, every participant kept a separate copy of how much money belonged to each pseudonym, and money was created by broadcasting the solution to "a previously unsolved computational problem," with the number of units minted equal to the cost of the computing effort measured against a standard basket of commodities. Recognizing that universal broadcast was impractical, Dai sketched a second protocol in which a subset of participants, the "servers," maintained the accounts on a Usenet-style broadcast channel and each deposited money in a special account to be forfeited as a fine on proof of misconduct, a bonded-validator structure that anticipated later proof-of-stake systems.[^3][^6] + +### Citation in the Bitcoin White Paper + +B-money appears as the first numbered reference in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Nakamoto first emailed Dai on August 22, 2008, writing, "I was very interested to read your b-money page," explaining that he was preparing "a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system," and that [[Adam Back]] of hashcash.org "noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site." Nakamoto asked for the year of publication so he could cite it, and Dai replied that b-money had been announced on the cypherpunks list in 1998.[^2][^4] + +Nakamoto wrote to Dai again on January 10, 2009, the day after releasing the Bitcoin software, saying it "achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper" through a system "entirely decentralized, without any server or trusted parties." Dai has said the creator did not actually read his proposal before independently reinventing the idea, learning of it and crediting him only afterward, and that he believes Nakamoto arrived at the concept independently. The smallest unit of ether on [[Ethereum]], the "wei," equal to one quintillionth of an ether, is named after Dai.[^4][^6] + +### Crypto++ and the Rationalist Community + +Dai released the first version of his Crypto++ open-source C++ cryptography library in June 1995 and worked as a programmer at the firm TerraSciences and then in Microsoft's cryptography research group, where he co-proposed the VMAC authentication algorithm and held cryptography patents, before turning the library over to the community in 2015.[^1][^7] + +On LessWrong, the rationalist forum founded by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], Dai introduced updateless decision theory in his August 2009 post "Towards a New Decision Theory," a framework treating the decision-maker as an algorithm that does not update on observations, which resolves Newcomb's problem and counterfactual mugging and fed into the functional decision theory later developed at the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute|MIRI]]. He is a pessimistic voice on artificial-intelligence safety, arguing that problems in metaethics and metaphilosophy should be solved before building artificial general intelligence, which places him within the same [[Extropianism|extropian]]-descended intellectual milieu that produced [[Hal Finney]] and [[Nick Szabo]].[^5][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Cypherpunks Write Code: Wei Dai and B-money," *Medium,* on Dai's biography, b-money, Crypto++, and LessWrong activity. https://medium.com/@Carrsos1/cypherpunks-write-code-wei-dai-and-b-money-or-a-coin-before-bitcoin-8bf5836bfb36 +[^2]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, citing Wei Dai's b-money. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf +[^3]: Dai, Wei. "b-money," 1998. http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt +[^4]: "Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails," Gwern.net, on the 2008 correspondence and Back pointing Nakamoto to b-money. https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto +[^5]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on the extropian and cypherpunk overlap of Dai, Finney, and Szabo. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^6]: Dai, Wei. "b-money," 1998, on the two protocols, proof-of-work issuance, and the bonded servers. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/b-money/ "Satoshi Nakamoto emails to Wei Dai, 2008-2009," Gwern.net, on the August 22, 2008 and January 10, 2009 messages. https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto +[^7]: Crypto++ Library, weidai11/cryptopp, GitHub, on the June 1995 first release and the library's history. https://github.com/weidai11/cryptopp +[^8]: Dai, Wei. "Towards a New Decision Theory," LessWrong, August 13, 2009. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/de3xjFaACCAk6imzv/towards-a-new-decision-theory diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/William Burns.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/William Burns.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f0a7decb --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/William Burns.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "Intelligence & Government" +tags: + - Person + - WilliamBurns + - CIA + - StateDepartment + - JeffreyEpstein + - Palantir + - Biden + - Intelligence +alias: + - William J. Burns + - Bill Burns +summary: "William J. Burns is an American diplomat and intelligence official who served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, president of the Carnegie Endowment, and Director of Central Intelligence from 2021 to 2025 under Joe Biden, and whose multiple 2014 meetings with Jeffrey Epstein at the Epstein Manhattan townhouse were documented in the Wall Street Journal's 2023 review of the Epstein calendars." +born: 1956-04-11 +location: "Fort Bragg, North Carolina (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +William J. Burns (born April 11, 1956, at [[Fort Bragg|Fort Bragg, North Carolina]]) is an American diplomat and intelligence official who served as the [[Director of Central Intelligence]] from March 2021 to January 2025 under President [[Joe Biden|Joe Biden]]. Burns's career spans the [[United States Foreign Service|Foreign Service]] (ambassador to [[Jordan]] 1998-2001, assistant secretary of state for [[Near Eastern Affairs]] 2001-2005, ambassador to [[Russia]] 2005-2008, deputy secretary of state 2011-2014), the think-tank sector (president of the [[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]] 2015-2021), and the intelligence community (CIA director 2021-2025). The [[Wall Street Journal]] reported in 2023, on the basis of the [[Epstein Files|Epstein calendars]], that Burns met with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] on multiple occasions in 2014 at the Epstein Manhattan townhouse, while Burns was between the deputy-secretary-of-state tenure and the Carnegie Endowment presidency. Burns stated through a spokesperson that he "deeply regrets" the meetings and was unaware of Epstein's 2008 conviction at the time.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Career and the Diplomatic-to-Intelligence Trajectory + +Burns entered the Foreign Service in 1982 and rose through the Near Eastern Affairs and policy-planning ranks under both Republican and Democratic administrations. His ambassadorial assignments in Jordan and Russia and his tenure as assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs placed him at the operational center of U.S. Middle East policy across the [[September 11 attacks|9/11]] period, the [[Iraq War|Iraq War]], and the post-[[Arab Spring|Arab Spring]] regional realignment. His 2011-2014 tenure as deputy secretary of state under [[Hillary Clinton|Hillary Clinton]] and [[John Kerry|John Kerry]] covered the [[Benghazi|Benghazi]] period, the [[Iran nuclear deal|Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA)]] negotiations, and the early stages of the [[Syrian Civil War|Syrian conflict]].[^1] + +The 2014 transition from deputy secretary of state to the [[Carnegie Endowment]] presidency is the gap during which the Epstein meetings occurred. Burns left government in November 2014 and took the Carnegie Endowment presidency in February 2015, and the WSJ-reported Epstein meetings fall within the 2014 window when Burns was a private citizen but still the most recently retired deputy secretary of state. Burns spent the six years (2015-2021) between the State Department departure and the CIA directorship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[^1] + +### The Epstein Meetings + +The Wall Street Journal's May 2023 report on the Epstein calendars documented that Burns met with Jeffrey Epstein on multiple occasions in 2014, including at the Epstein Manhattan townhouse. The reporting was based on the schedules and emails obtained from the Epstein files, which the WSJ reviewed. The meetings occurred after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement but before the 2019 federal sex-trafficking charges. Burns stated through a spokesperson that he was unaware of Epstein's 2008 conviction at the time and that he cut ties with Epstein upon learning of it. [[The Guardian]] reported Burns's statement that he "deeply regrets ever meeting" with Epstein.[^1][^2] + +The Carstensen EFTA index documents additional Epstein file entries relevant to the Burns-Epstein relationship. The Tommy Carstensen aggregator cross-references the EFTA releases to document the Thiel-Epstein-Burns overlap: [[Peter Thiel]]'s documented 2014 meetings at the Epstein townhouse overlap chronologically with Burns's, placing the chairman of a major [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] contractor ([[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]], whose government business includes the CIA as a client) and the future CIA director in the same Epstein-mediated setting within the same calendar year. Burns became CIA director in March 2021, seven years after the meetings.[^3][^4] + +### The Palantir Overlap + +Palantir Technologies received early funding from the CIA venture arm [[In-Q-Tel]] in 2004 and is a documented CIA platform supplier through its [[Palantir Gotham|Gotham]] product. Burns's CIA directorship (2021-2025) postdated his 2014 Epstein meetings by seven years. The Carstensen EFTA index documents that Peter Thiel's 2014 meetings at the Epstein townhouse overlap chronologically with Burns's, placing the future CIA director and the Palantir chairman on the same Epstein-mediated social terrain within the same calendar year.[^3][^4] + +The substantive question of what was discussed at the Burns-Epstein meetings, and whether any of it touched on Palantir or on intelligence matters, is not documented in the primary sources currently available. Burns's spokesperson's statement framed the meetings as relating to Burns's transition to the Carnegie Endowment and to geopolitics, and the WSJ reporting did not establish that intelligence or contracting matters were discussed. The Epstein calendars and the Carstensen-indexed EFTA entries are the primary record; they document the co-presence but not the meeting content.[^1][^3] + +### The CIA Directorship and the Biden Tenure + +Burns was nominated for the CIA directorship by President Biden in November 2020 and confirmed by the Senate in March 2021. His tenure covered the [[Withdrawal from Afghanistan|2021 Afghanistan withdrawal]], the [[Russian invasion of Ukraine|2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine]] (Burns had met with [[Sergei Naryshkin|Russian SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin]] in Moscow in November 2021 in a documented attempt to dissuade the invasion), the [[Hamas-Israel war|2023 Hamas-Israel war]], and the broader [[China|China]]-Russia strategic realignment. Burns returned to private life in January 2025 at the end of the Biden administration.[^1] + +The 2023 disclosure of the 2014 Epstein meetings surfaced the connection after Burns had already become CIA director, placing a sitting CIA director in the publicly disclosed Epstein relationship. Burns's spokesperson's framing (unaware of the conviction, regrets the meetings, cut ties on learning) is the official position. The underlying primary documents are the Epstein calendars and the Carstensen-indexed EFTA entries.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Private Calendar: CIA Director William Burns..." *Wall Street Journal,* May 2023. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-calendar-cia-director-goldman-sachs-noam-chomsky-c9f6a3ff ; For Burns's career and the CIA directorship, see the CIA official biography and the contemporaneous confirmation and tenure coverage. +[^2]: "Jeffrey Epstein messaged with former CIA director Bill Burns, files show." *The Guardian,* February 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/jeffrey-epstein-bill-burns-cia-messages +[^3]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, "Peter Thiel," cross-referencing the EFTA releases. https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^4]: For the Palantir Technologies-In-Q-Tel relationship and the CIA client base, see the Palantir Technologies page and the underlying SEC EDGAR filings. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/maia arson crimew.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/maia arson crimew.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..59a18721 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/maia arson crimew.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - MaiaArsonCrimew + - TillieKottmann + - Hacker + - Leak + - Verkada + - NoFlyList + - APT69420 +alias: + - Tillie Kottmann + - crimew + - maia arson crimew +summary: "maia arson crimew (formerly Tillie Kottmann) is a Swiss hacker from Lucerne who led the collective APT69420, leaked the U.S. No Fly List in January 2023 from a misconfigured CommuteAir server, and in June 2026 published the membership directory of Peter Thiel's secret Dialog society." +born: 2000-08-19 +location: "Lucerne, Switzerland" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +maia arson crimew (formerly known as Tillie Kottmann) is a Swiss hacker and software developer from [[Lucerne]], [[Switzerland]], who led the hacker collective [[APT69420]] (Arson Cats) and is known for a series of high-profile data disclosures including the 2021 [[Verkada]] security-camera breach, the January 2023 leak of the U.S. [[No Fly List]] from a misconfigured [[CommuteAir]] server, and the June 2026 publication of the membership directory of [[Peter Thiel]]'s secret society [[Dialog]]. crimew was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in the [[Western District of Washington]] in March 2021 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft related to the 2019-2021 source-code-leak activity, but has not been sentenced because Switzerland does not extradite its own citizens.[^1][^2][^3] + +crimew produced the 2026 leak that generated the first primary record of Dialog's membership, and the disclosure extends a documented pattern of high-impact releases of sensitive institutional data held by inadequately secured servers. crimew occupies a specific role in the disclosure ecosystem: not a whistleblower with internal access but an external intruder who exploits misconfigured infrastructure, and whose releases are selected for political and public-interest effect rather than for financial gain. + +### The Verkada Breach and APT69420 + +crimew led the hacker collective APT69420 (styled Advanced Persistent Threat 69420, a parody of nation-state threat-actor naming conventions), which in March 2021 breached the U.S. security-camera company Verkada. The breach accessed live and archived surveillance footage from approximately 150,000 cameras deployed across hospitals, schools, prisons, police departments, corporate offices, and [[Tesla]] facilities, including cameras inside a Tesla warehouse, the [[Halifax Health]] medical center, and the [[Madison County Jail]] in [[Alabama]]. The access was obtained through a [[super admin]] account found exposed on the company's internal network.[^2][^4] + +A single compromise of the Verkada platform operator exposed footage from thousands of geographically dispersed and functionally unrelated installations. crimew and the APT69420 collective published selected footage and shared access with journalists, framing the release as an exposure of the surveillance infrastructure that organizations had built without adequate awareness of its concentration. The breach prompted Verkada to restructure its access controls and drew regulatory attention to the surveillance-camera-as-a-service industry.[^4] + +### The No Fly List Leak + +In January 2023 crimew disclosed that, while "bored" in late 2022, they had accessed the U.S. government's No Fly List on an unsecured CommuteAir server (a misconfigured [[Amazon Web Services|AWS]] instance operated by the regional airline). The list, a 2019 version containing approximately 1.5 million entries of individuals barred from boarding commercial flights into or within the United States, was shared with the journalism publication *[[Daily Dot|Daily Dot]]* and subsequently published on a hacking forum. crimew noted in the release that the list "trends towards almost exclusively Arabic sounding names," a finding that became part of the public record of the documented racial and religious disproportion in the watchlisting system.[^3][^5] + +The No Fly List leak placed a copy of a previously secret government watchlist in the public domain and permitted independent analysis of its composition. The release fed into ongoing litigation over the due-process deficiencies of the federal watchlisting system and into academic and journalistic analysis of the list's demographics. The legal status of the list itself remains contested; crimew's release, by making it analyzable, converted a secret instrument of administrative control into a public artifact.[^5] + +### Federal Indictment and the Extradition Bar + +In March 2021 crimew was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in the Western District of Washington on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft, related to alleged hacking activity between 2019 and 2021 (the source-code-leak cases including [[Intel]], [[Nissan]], and other firms, not the later Verkada or No Fly List disclosures). The conspiracy-to-commit-computer-fraud count carries a maximum of five years; the wire-fraud and aggravated-identity-theft counts carry additional penalties.[^1] + +crimew has not been sentenced and is not in U.S. custody, because Switzerland does not extradite its own citizens under its federal constitution. The practical effect is a lifetime travel restriction: crimew cannot leave Switzerland without risk of arrest and extradition to the United States from any third country that does extradite. crimew has spoken publicly about the restriction and continues to live and work in Switzerland. The case is one of a recurring pattern in which European hackers indicted under U.S. computer-fraud statutes remain outside U.S. custody due to national extradition limits, and the pattern is part of the broader jurisdictional friction the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act produces when applied extraterritorially.[^1][^6] + +### The Dialog Disclosure + +In June 2026 crimew published a membership directory of the Dialog secret society that had been embedded in the source code of the Dialog website, reflecting the site's access controls. The published list named approximately 113 affiliates. A source separately provided the complete 2026 retreat registration list (222 names) to *WIRED*, which published the combined reporting. crimew's release was the website-source disclosure; the registration list came through a different channel.[^7] + +The Dialog disclosure used the same method as the prior releases: external access to inadequately secured infrastructure (the website source code containing the membership directory), a release selected for its political and public-interest weight, and framing language that emphasizes the disclosure function. The target differed from Verkada and the No Fly List: a private convening network rather than a surveillance vendor or a government watchlist, and a network whose secrecy posture had been reinforced by the Thiel-funded [[Bollea v. Gawker|Gawker]] litigation.[^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: U.S. Department of Justice, Western District of Washington. "Swiss Hacker Indicted for Conspiracy, Wire Fraud, and Aggravated Identity Theft." March 2021. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/swiss-hacker-indicted-conspiracy-wire-fraud-and-aggravated-identity-theft +[^2]: Coverage of the Verkada breach and APT69420 in *Bloomberg,* *The Verge,* and *Wired,* March 2021. +[^3]: Coverage of the No Fly List leak in *Daily Dot,* *BleepingComputer,* and *Fortune,* January 2023. +[^4]: For the Verkada breach technical detail, see the published APT69420 release materials and contemporaneous security-press coverage. +[^5]: crimew, maia arson. No Fly List release statement, January 2023, via the *Daily Dot* publication of the analyzed list. +[^6]: For the Swiss non-extradition of citizens and crimew's resulting travel restriction, see *WRS (World Radio Switzerland)* reporting and crimew's own public statements. +[^7]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Aldous Huxley.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Aldous Huxley.md index 035cf99a..92d50db3 100644 --- a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Aldous Huxley.md +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Aldous Huxley.md @@ -1,36 +1,68 @@ --- -title: Aldous Huxley -aliases: - - Aldous Huxley - - Aldous Leonard Huxley -created: 2026-05-17 -updated: 2026-05-18 category: "Authors & Journalists" tags: - Person - Author - - Parapsychology - Psychedelics + - Parapsychology + - HumanPotentialMovement + - SocialControl + - Literature + - Eugenics - UnitedKingdom -summary: "Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British author and philosopher whose interest in consciousness and psi led him to document his mescaline experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954) and to visit Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation parapsychology research group in 1955." +alias: + - Aldous Huxley + - Aldous Leonard Huxley +summary: "Aldous Huxley was the novelist of Brave New World who pioneered the literary use of psychedelics in The Doors of Perception, visited Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation parapsychology group, helped seed the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential movement, and lectured on a coming pharmacological dictatorship he called the ultimate revolution." born: 1894-07-26 died: 1963-11-22 -location: "Godalming, Surrey, England" +location: "Godalming, England; Los Angeles, California" +created: 2026-05-17 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a renowned English writer and philosopher, best known for his dystopian novel *Brave New World*. He had a keen interest in the [[Consciousness|trance state]] and its potential as a means of gathering unseen information about the natural world, a fascination that led him to experiment with psychedelic substances and observe the work of [[Andrija Puharich]][^1]. +Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 to November 22, 1963) was an English writer best known for the dystopian novel *Brave New World* (1932), and later one of the central figures linking the psychedelic counterculture, the [[Esalen Institute]], and the Human Potential movement. He was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the younger brother of [[Julian Huxley]], the evolutionary biologist who coined the modern usage of "[[Transhumanism|transhumanism]]." A severe eye infection in his teens left him nearly blind for almost three years and gave him a lifelong preoccupation with perception and with senses beyond the ordinary five. His mescaline experiment recorded in *The Doors of Perception* (1954) introduced psychedelic drugs to a wide literary audience, and his late lectures on what he called the "ultimate revolution" warned of pharmacological methods of social control. He died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963, having asked to be injected with LSD as he died.[^1][^2][^11] -Huxley's personal experiences with mescaline, the principal hallucinogenic agent in peyote, were documented in his 1954 book, *The Doors of Perception*. This work explored the expansion of consciousness through drug use and met with both controversy and widespread readership, influencing counterculture movements[^1]. +### Brave New World -In August 1955, Huxley visited [[Andrija Puharich]] at the [[Round Table Foundation]] in Maine. He was intrigued by the diverse group of individuals assembled by Puharich, including various psychics and researchers. Huxley noted the presence of [[Harry Stump]], the Dutch sculptor, who would go into trances in the [[Faraday Cage]] and produce automatic scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphics[^1]. +*Brave New World*, published in 1932, projected a future World State in which human beings are mass-produced in hatcheries, sorted before birth into a rigid biological caste system from Alpha down to Epsilon, conditioned from infancy to love their assigned station, and kept docile by the pleasure drug soma and by constant consumption and casual sex. The novel satirized the application of [[Eugenics|eugenic]] breeding, Pavlovian conditioning, and Fordist mass production to human life, depicting a totalitarian order that secures obedience not through terror but through engineered contentment. Huxley took the title from Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, in which Miranda exclaims, "O brave new world, that has such people in it."[^1][^3] -Huxley was present when Puharich attempted to drug [[Harry Stump]] with the *teonanáctl* mushroom. He observed Stump's confused and intoxicated state and insisted that Puharich administer an antidote. Huxley expressed ethical concerns about drugging Stump without his knowledge[^1]. +Huxley returned to the book's themes in *Brave New World Revisited* (1958), a set of essays comparing his 1932 forecast with the world of the 1950s and judging that overpopulation, propaganda, advertising, and chemical persuasion were carrying society toward his imagined dystopia faster than he had expected. He argued there that the methods of control in a future scientific dictatorship would resemble the seductive conditioning of *Brave New World* more than the overt brutality of George Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four*, because a population that has been taught to enjoy its servitude requires no policing.[^3][^4] -Huxley's interest in the sixth sense stemmed from a childhood eye infection that left him partially blind for nearly three years, making him keenly aware of perception beyond the five known senses[^1]. +### The Doors of Perception and Psychedelics -### Publications -* *Brave New World* (1932) -* *The Doors of Perception* (1954) +In 1953 Huxley wrote to the psychiatrist [[Humphry Osmond]], who was researching [[mescaline]], asking to take the drug under observation, and on May 4, 1953, in his home in Los Angeles, he swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in water. His account of the experience appeared as *The Doors of Perception* (1954), which described the way ordinary objects, a vase of flowers, the folds of his trousers, blazed with significance and argued that the brain acts as a "reducing valve" filtering out a wider "Mind at Large" that the drug lets through. The title comes from William Blake's *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell* (1793): "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."[^2][^5] + +Huxley went on to take [[LSD]], first supplied on Christmas Eve 1955 by the businessman [[Al Hubbard]], and explored the drugs as a route to mystical experience, a theme he had already framed in *The Perennial Philosophy* (1945), his anthology of the common mystical core he discerned across the world's religions. He set out his case for the controlled use of psychedelics in *Heaven and Hell* (1956), the sequel to *The Doors of Perception*. His writings gave the emerging drug culture much of its vocabulary, and the rock band the Doors took its name from his title.[^5][^6] + +### Parapsychology and the Round Table Foundation + +Huxley's interest in expanded consciousness extended to psychical research and the [[Consciousness|trance state]] as a possible means of perceiving unseen information about the world. In August 1955 he visited the physician and parapsychologist [[Andrija Puharich]] at the [[Round Table Foundation]] in Maine, a privately funded research group that gathered psychics and scientists to study extrasensory perception. Huxley was intrigued by the assembled circle, among them the Dutch sculptor [[Harry Stump]], who would enter trances inside a [[Faraday Cage]] and produce automatic scripts in what was described as Egyptian hieroglyphics.[^11] + +During the visit Huxley was present when Puharich attempted to drug Stump with the teonanácatl mushroom without his knowledge. Observing Stump's confused and intoxicated state, Huxley raised ethical objections and insisted that Puharich administer an antidote. The episode is recorded in Annie Jacobsen's history of the United States government's investigations into extrasensory perception.[^11] + +### Island, Esalen, and the Human Potential Movement + +Huxley's final novel, *Island* (1962), was the utopian counterpart to *Brave New World*, depicting the fictional Pacific island of Pala where a humane society uses the consciousness-expanding "moksha-medicine," a psychedelic, together with meditation, tantric practice, and ecological living, to cultivate awareness rather than to enforce conformity. The book turned the same technologies of mind that the earlier novel had portrayed as instruments of control toward the opposite end of human liberation and growth.[^7] + +Huxley's lectures on "human potentialities," which he delivered in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including a 1960 lecture series, supplied the conceptual language for the Esalen Institute, founded at Big Sur, California, in 1962 by [[Michael Murphy]] and Dick Price. Price had been moved by hearing Huxley speak on human potentialities, and the founders drew on Huxley's phrasing in framing Esalen's program; Huxley, his wife Laura, and members of his circle such as Gerald Heard, [[Alan Watts]], and [[Gregory Bateson]] provided early support and networking. Huxley visited Murphy and Price at Big Sur in January 1962, shortly before his death, and his ideas became part of the foundation of the Human Potential movement that grew out of Esalen.[^7][^8] + +### The Ultimate Revolution and Pharmacological Control + +On March 20, 1962, Huxley delivered a talk to the Berkeley Language Center titled "The Ultimate Revolution," in which he described a coming form of dictatorship that would secure compliance through pleasure rather than pain. He predicted "a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it." He judged that the scientific dictatorships of the future would resemble the *Brave New World* pattern more closely than the *Nineteen Eighty-Four* pattern, because conditioning and chemistry are more efficient instruments of rule than force.[^9][^4] + +Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer and died at his Los Angeles home on November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Unable to speak, he wrote a request that his wife Laura administer LSD, and she injected him with one hundred micrograms, followed by a second dose, as he died in the late afternoon. Laura Huxley recounted the deathbed scene in a letter to Julian Huxley, later published as part of her memoir *This Timeless Moment* (1968).[^2][^10] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. + +[^1]: Huxley, Aldous. *Brave New World.* Chatto and Windus, 1932; with "Aldous Huxley," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on his life and family. +[^2]: "Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963)," *Open Culture,* on the deathbed LSD request and Laura Huxley's letter. https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/aldous-huxley-dying-of-cancer-left-this-world-tripping-on-lsd-1963 +[^3]: Huxley, Aldous. *Brave New World Revisited.* Harper and Brothers, 1958, on the caste system, conditioning, and the comparison with Orwell. +[^4]: "Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution," 1962 Berkeley lecture, on the *Brave New World* versus *Nineteen Eighty-Four* contrast and pharmacological control. https://publicintelligence.net/aldous-huxley-1962-u-c-berkeley-speech-on-the-ultimate-revolution/ +[^5]: "When Aldous Huxley Opened the Doors of Perception," *The MIT Press Reader,* on the May 1953 mescaline experiment with Humphry Osmond and the Blake source of the title. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-aldous-huxley-opened-the-doors-of-perception/ +[^6]: "Al Hubbard furnishes Aldous Huxley with LSD on December 24, 1955," HistoryLink, on Huxley's first LSD experience; with Huxley, Aldous. *The Perennial Philosophy.* Harper and Brothers, 1945, and *Heaven and Hell.* Chatto and Windus, 1956. +[^7]: Huxley, Aldous. *Island.* Chatto and Windus, 1962, on Pala and the moksha-medicine. +[^8]: "Aldous Huxley's Influence on the Esalen Institute," *Longreads,* on the human-potentialities lectures, Murphy and Price, and the 1962 Big Sur visit. https://longreads.com/2015/06/09/aldous-huxleys-influence-on-the-esalen-institute/ +[^9]: Huxley, Aldous. "The Ultimate Revolution," lecture at the Berkeley Language Center, March 20, 1962, quoted text. https://ia801803.us.archive.org/30/items/huxley-aldous-the-ultimate-revolution_202012/Huxley%20Aldous%20-%20The%20ultimate%20revolution.pdf +[^10]: Huxley, Laura Archera. *This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley.* Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968, on the deathbed LSD doses. +[^11]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017, on Huxley's childhood near-blindness, his August 1955 visit to Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation, Harry Stump's Faraday-cage trances, and the teonanáctl episode. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Alex Karp.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Alex Karp.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8c07cd5c --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Alex Karp.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - AlexKarp + - Palantir + - PeterThiel + - Surveillance + - Israel +summary: "Alex Karp is the cofounder and chief executive of Palantir Technologies, a Stanford-trained social theorist who built the data-analytics firm with Peter Thiel and turned it into a major contractor to U.S. intelligence, the military, and Israel." +born: 1967-10-02 +location: "Palo Alto, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Alex Karp (born October 2, 1967) is the cofounder and chief executive of [[Palantir Technologies]], the data-analytics and surveillance firm he built in 2003 with [[Peter Thiel]], [[Joe Lonsdale|Joseph Lonsdale]], [[Stephen Cohen]], and [[Nathan Gettings]]. Trained as a lawyer and a social theorist rather than an engineer, Karp runs the operational side of the company while Thiel chairs it, and he became one of the most outspoken defenders of its work for U.S. intelligence, the military, and [[Israel]].[^1][^2] + +### Background + +Karp grew up in the [[Philadelphia]] area in a politically left-leaning household, the son of a Jewish pediatrician father and an African American artist mother, and is dyslexic. He took a bachelor's degree from Haverford College in 1989, a law degree at [[Stanford University]] in 1992, where he met Thiel, and a 2002 doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in [[Frankfurt]] with a German-language dissertation titled "Aggression in der Lebenswelt." The doctorate is often described as supervised by the philosopher [[Jürgen Habermas]], but the scholar Moira Weigel, examining the record, found his actual advisor was the sociologist Karola Brede and reported that Habermas had rejected a draft of his thesis.[^1][^7] + +Before Palantir, Karp managed money in London through a firm he named the Caedmon Group, seeded with a small inheritance from his grandfather and built up with largely European high-net-worth clients, and he occasionally helped Thiel raise capital. He and Thiel founded Palantir in 2003 with about two million dollars in early backing from the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] venture arm [[In-Q-Tel]] and roughly thirty million dollars Thiel put up himself as conventional venture firms declined, taking its name from the seeing-stones of Tolkien's fiction. Karp has led it as chief executive since, taking it public through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange on September 30, 2020, and his 2020 compensation, dominated by stock options, reached about 1.1 billion dollars.[^3][^8] + +### Politics and the Gaza War + +Karp was critical of [[Donald Trump]] during his first term and backed [[Kamala Harris]] in 2024, but his politics shifted after the October 7, 2023 [[Hamas]] attack on Israel. Palantir signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry on January 12, 2024, around three months into the war, and held a special board meeting in Tel Aviv that Thiel and Karp attended, supplying its Artificial Intelligence Platform for intelligence and targeting work in [[Gaza]]. He has said that staff departures over his pro-Israel stance do not trouble him, arguing that "if you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it's not a position."[^2][^4][^9] + +Interrupted by a protester at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025, Karp said "the primary source of death in Palestine" was "the fact that Hamas has realised that there are millions and millions of useful idiots." In Palantir's February 2025 shareholder letter he wrote that the company exists "to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them," and he has described "wokeness" as a "thin pagan religion" and the central risk to the country. By 2025 Palantir was a leading contractor to the second Trump administration: its Maven Smart System contract was expanded by 795 million dollars in May 2025, and in July 2025 the Army announced a consolidated enterprise agreement with a ceiling of up to ten billion dollars, the largest contract in the company's history.[^5][^10][^11] + +### The Technological Republic + +Karp published *The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West*, written with [[Nicholas Zamiska]], through Crown on February 18, 2025, and it became a New York Times bestseller. The book argues that Silicon Valley "lost its way" by chasing "shiny new toys, from phone apps and games to marketing algorithms" and "lifestyle technologies," and that the "engineering elite" must rebuild its ties to government and the military.[^6] + +Karp pointed to [[Google]]'s 2018 withdrawal from the Pentagon's Project Maven, under employee pressure, as a warning of what he called self-centered libertarianism, and the book frames a "reassertion of national culture and values" as the precondition for technological power. Critics at Al Jazeera and The Nation read it as a statement of the techno-nationalist politics shared across the Thiel network. By 2026 Karp's net worth was estimated in the range of 13 to 14 billion dollars, having peaked above 16 billion in August 2025 as Palantir's stock climbed.[^6][^12] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Palantir CEO Alex Karp was raised in a liberal household outside Philly. Now he's a top Trump administration contractor," *The Philadelphia Inquirer,* December 16, 2025. https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-trump-administration-20251216.html +[^2]: "Palantir CEO says his outspoken pro-Israel views have caused employees to leave company," *CNBC,* March 13, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/palantir-ceo-says-outspoken-pro-israel-views-led-employees-to-leave-.html +[^3]: "Blood tech: The UK ambassador, the sex offender, Palantir, and Gaza," *Al Jazeera,* March 17, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/17/blood-tech-the-uk-ambassador-the-sex-offender-palantir-and-gaza +[^4]: "Palantir CEO stands firm in support of Israel despite employee departures," *Calcalist,* 2024. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hy1q67e0a +[^5]: "Palantir's Alex Karp could lose staff over Israel stance," *Fortune,* March 14, 2024. https://fortune.com/2024/03/14/palantir-alex-karp-lose-staff-israel-stance +[^6]: "Technofacism? Why Palantir's pro-West 'manifesto' has critics alarmed," *Al Jazeera,* April 21, 2026, on *The Technological Republic.* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/21/technofacism-why-palantirs-pro-west-manifesto-has-critics-alarmed +[^7]: Weigel, Moira. "Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School," *boundary 2,* July 2020, on Karp's Haverford and Stanford degrees, the Frankfurt dissertation "Aggression in der Lebenswelt," and his advisor Karola Brede rather than Habermas. https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/ +[^8]: "Palantir's direct listing," *CNBC,* September 30, 2020, on the NYSE listing and the In-Q-Tel and Thiel funding; and "Palantir CEO Alex Karp's $1.1 billion 2020 pay," *CNBC,* April 29, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/palantir-pltr-starts-trading-on-the-nyse-in-direct-listing.html +[^9]: "Palantir signs strategic partnership with Israeli Defense Ministry," *Bloomberg,* January 12, 2024, on the agreement and the Tel Aviv board meeting. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-signs-strategic-partnership-with-israel-defense-ministry +[^10]: "Palantir CEO Alex Karp's 'useful idiots' remark at the Hill and Valley Forum," April 30, 2025; and the February 2025 Palantir shareholder letter, on the "scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them" passage. *CNBC,* May 5, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/palantir-pltr-q1-earnings-report-2025.html +[^11]: "Army awards Palantir enterprise agreement worth up to $10 billion," *DefenseScoop,* July 31, 2025, on the consolidated contract ceiling; and "Palantir Maven Smart System expanded by $795 million," *DefenseScoop,* May 23, 2025. https://defensescoop.com/2025/07/31/army-palantir-enterprise-agreement-10-billion/ +[^12]: "Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Alex Karp," 2026, on his estimated net worth and its August 2025 peak. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/alexander-c-karp/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Auren Hoffman.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Auren Hoffman.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..441476cf --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Auren Hoffman.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - AurenHoffman + - Dialog + - SafeGraph + - LiveRamp + - SiliconValley + - Surveillance +alias: + - Auren Ability Hoffman +summary: "Auren Hoffman is an American technology entrepreneur who cofounded the secret society Dialog with Peter Thiel in 2006 and founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, placing him at the intersection of the Thiel elite-network and the consumer-data-brokerage industry." +born: 1970-09-05 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Auren Hoffman is an American technology entrepreneur and the cofounder, with [[Peter Thiel]], of the secret society [[Dialog]], and the founder of the location-data brokerage [[SafeGraph]] and the identity-resolution firm [[LiveRamp]]. His career has placed him at the center of two converging networks: the Thiel elite-gathering and venture network (through Dialog and [[Summit|Summit Series]]-adjacent social circles), and the consumer-data-brokerage industry (through LiveRamp and SafeGraph). The 2026 leak of Dialog's membership roster identified Hoffman as Dialog's chairman and the data entrepreneur whose firms have repeatedly drawn scrutiny for the sale of granular consumer location and identity data to corporate and government clients.[^1] + +Hoffman holds the two roles simultaneously: he runs the off-the-record network in which government principals meet technology and finance principals, and he runs the firms that supply consumer-behavior data to government agencies. The convening network determines who talks to whom; the data network determines what is known about the population those conversations govern. The two are held by the same individual. + +### Dialog Chairmanship + +Dialog was cofounded by Thiel and Hoffman in 2006 as an invitation-only retreat convening U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and [[Silicon Valley]] executives under off-the-record rules. Hoffman serves as the organization's chairman. The 2026 *WIRED* report, based on the leak published by the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] and a separately provided registration list, identified Hoffman as the operational principal of Dialog alongside Thiel as the financial and reputational principal. Hoffman appears on the 222-name 2026 retreat roster.[^1] + +The division of labor between Thiel and Hoffman at Dialog tracks their comparative advantages. Thiel supplies the reputational gravity that draws the [[PayPal Mafia]] core, the [[Palantir Technologies]] government client base, and the ideological principals of the [[Neoreaction]] orbit; Hoffman supplies the convening craft, the data-industry network, and the operational discipline to run a recurring institution. The two-decade persistence of Dialog without a public leak until 2026 reflects the operational seriousness of the arrangement, and the chairman role indicates that the day-to-day institution is Hoffman's rather than Thiel's.[^1] + +### LiveRamp and Identity Resolution + +Hoffman founded LiveRamp (originally as [[RapLeaf]]) as a data-onboarding and identity-resolution company, building systems to match offline customer data to online identifiers across advertising and marketing ecosystems. LiveRamp was acquired by the advertising-technology holding company [[Acxiom]] in 2014 for approximately 310 million dollars, and was later spun out as an independent public company, [[Ramp Holdings]], trading on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] under the ticker RAMP. The core technical product, identity resolution across disparate data sets, is the same operational problem that underlies both commercial marketing and state surveillance.[^2] + +The identity-resolution problem is the joining-key problem: given a name and address in one database, a cookie in another, a device advertising ID in a third, and a loyalty-card number in a fourth, determine that all four refer to the same person. Commercially, the solution lets an advertiser track a single consumer across web, mobile, and in-store behavior. The same technique, applied to telecommunications, financial, and location data, lets a state or its contractor track a single person across the same surfaces. LiveRamp's commercial product and the intelligence-application of the same architecture are technically identical, though LiveRamp's clients were commercial.[^2] + +### SafeGraph and Location Data + +Hoffman founded SafeGraph in 2014 as a location-data brokerage, aggregating and reselling anonymized mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications. SafeGraph's datasets have been used in academic research, real estate, and advertising, and the company has repeatedly drawn scrutiny over the granularity of its data and its accessibility to government clients. In 2020 the U.S. [[Centers for Disease Control and Prevention|CDC]] contracted with SafeGraph for cell-phone location data to monitor compliance with [[COVID-19]] pandemic movement restrictions, a use that surfaced the extent to which commercially collected location data is available to federal agencies without a warrant.[^1][^3] + +The CDC contract made publicly visible what had been an open secret in the industry: commercially collected location data is at least as granular and as current as anything the intelligence community collects under legal process, and it is available for purchase without a warrant because the data is "volunteered" by the user through app permissions. The 2026 Dialog leak renewed scrutiny of Hoffman's position at the intersection of elite-network convening and the commercial surveillance-data industry, because the same individual chairing the off-the-record gathering of senators, governors, and military commanders also chairs the firm that sold the location data to the CDC.[^1] + +Hoffman's combined roles produce a data-broker-to-regulator pathway. The same firm (SafeGraph) that sells consumer location data commercially also sells it to federal public-health and law-enforcement agencies, while its founder chairs a private gathering (Dialog) whose membership includes sitting U.S. senators, governors, military commanders, and technology executives. The convening network (who talks to whom, off the record) and the data network (who knows what about the population) are run by the same individual, and the Dialog chairmanship is where the two networks overlap in person.[^1] + +### Earlier Ventures + +Prior to LiveRamp and SafeGraph, Hoffman founded [[Bridgepath]], an early online recruiting service that operated in the late-1990s web-services market. Bridgepath was part of the first wave of internet-era recruiting platforms that attempted to apply database-matching to the job-search function, the same identity-resolution-and-matching architecture that would subsequently underlie both LiveRamp and SafeGraph. Hoffman's experience with the data-matching problem at Bridgepath preceded his founding of the identity-resolution firms by approximately a decade.[^2] + +Hoffman ran the technology strategy and research firm [[Stonebrick Group|Stonebrick]] in the period between Bridgepath and LiveRamp. The Stonebrick work involved advising technology firms on growth strategy and market positioning, and the client relationships Hoffman built during this period formed the basis of the investor-and-founder network he would subsequently bring to the Dialog convening. Hoffman's *Summation* blog (later Substack newsletter) and his podcast output on technology and elite-network topics established his public profile as a convening figure before Dialog was founded.[^2] + +Hoffman is a recurring figure in the [[Summit Series|Summit Series]]-adjacent founder-and-investor social circuit. The Summit Series (now Summit) hosts the annual [[Summit at Sea|Summit at Sea]] and the [[Summit Powder Mountain|Summit Powder Mountain]] gatherings, and its audience overlaps substantially with the Dialog invitation list. Hoffman's positioning in the Silicon Valley founder-and-investor network, distinct from but overlapping with the PayPal Mafia core around Thiel, predates Dialog and supplied the peer network the gathering was built on.[^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: For LiveRamp and Ramp Holdings corporate history, see Ramp Holdings SEC EDGAR filings and the Acxiom 2014 acquisition record. +[^3]: For the CDC contract with SafeGraph in 2020, see contemporaneous reporting on federal procurement of commercial location data, including coverage in *The Wall Street Journal* and *Vice Motherboard* in 2020. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Blake Masters.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Blake Masters.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..54cd1d28 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Blake Masters.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - BlakeMasters + - PeterThiel + - ZeroToOne + - ThielCapital + - Arizona + - RepublicanParty + - Senate +alias: + - Blake Gates Masters +summary: "Blake Masters is an American venture capitalist and author who served as chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation, coauthored Zero to One with Peter Thiel in 2014, and was the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Arizona, backed by Thiel's super PAC spending." +born: 1986-08-18 +location: "Arizona (political base)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Blake Masters (born August 18, 1986) is an American venture capitalist and author who served as chief operating officer of [[Thiel Capital]] and president of the [[Thiel Foundation]] from 2018 to 2022, and who coauthored *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future* with [[Peter Thiel]] in 2014. Masters was the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from [[Arizona]], losing the general election to the incumbent Democrat [[Mark Kelly (politician)|Mark Kelly]] after winning the Republican primary with the financial backing of a Thiel-funded super PAC. His career is the second documented instance, alongside [[JD Vance]], of a Thiel-network operative placed into electoral politics through direct capital deployment.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Stanford, Zero to One, and the Thiel Apprenticeship + +Masters met Thiel at [[Stanford Law School]], where Masters was a student and Thiel was teaching an undergraduate course on startups in the computer science department. Masters took detailed notes on the course lectures and published them online in 2012, where they circulated widely in the [[Silicon Valley]] founder community. The notes formed the basis of *[[Zero to One|Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future]]*, published by [[Crown Business|Crown]] in 2014 with Thiel and Masters listed as coauthors. The book reached number one on the [[New York Times]] bestseller list and became the canonical text of the [[Founders Fund]] investment thesis.[^1][^2] + +The book's central arguments are that competition is for losers, that durable value comes from building monopolies around proprietary technology, and that the conventional venture-capital preference for incremental consumer-internet deals was a mistake. These arguments were drawn directly from Thiel's lectures, and Masters's role was the editorial and organizational work of converting them into a published book. The coauthorship placed Masters inside the Thiel orbit at the level of intellectual production, and the book's success made Masters a public figure in the venture and startup world before he had run a company of his own.[^2] + +### Thiel Capital, the Thiel Foundation, and the Fellowship + +Masters joined Thiel's firm Thiel Capital as chief operating officer and served as president of the Thiel Foundation, the vehicle that runs the [[Thiel Fellowship]] program. The dual role placed him in operational control of the two principal non-investment arms of the Thiel network: the firm's strategic and administrative functions (Thiel Capital), and the recruitment-and-mentorship program that identifies and capitalizes young founders outside the university pipeline (the Thiel Foundation and the Fellowship).[^1][^4] + +The Fellowship presidency is the recruitment-layer position. Masters ran the program that selects the cohort of approximately twenty-to-thirty fellows per year, each receiving 250,000 dollars over two years on the skip-or-stop-out-of-college condition, and his tenure overlapped with the cohort that included some of the program's most prominent alumni. The Fellowship functions as the earliest-stage recruitment layer of the Thiel network, and the president of the Foundation is the operative who staffs it.[^4] + +### The 2022 Arizona Senate Campaign + +Masters announced his candidacy for the [[United States Senate|U.S. Senate]] seat from Arizona in July 2021, seeking the Republican nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly. The campaign was backed from the outset by Thiel, who donated to the [[Saving Arizona PAC]], a super PAC formed to support Masters's primary campaign. The Thiel super PAC spending in the Arizona race ran alongside the larger Thiel deployment in the Ohio race that elected JD Vance, and the two campaigns were treated in contemporaneous reporting as a coordinated Thiel political project.[^3][^5] + +Masters won the August 2022 Republican primary, defeating the establishment-backed candidate [[Jim Lamon]] and several other contenders. The general election campaign against Mark Kelly was marked by Masters's shift toward the center on several positions he had taken during the primary, including his earlier endorsement of a federal personhood abortion ban and his expressed openness to privatizing [[Social Security]]. Kelly won the November 2022 general election by approximately five percentage points. Masters conceded and subsequently took a role in the private sector, including a board position at [[PublicSq|PSQ Holdings]], the public-company successor to the conservative marketplace platform PublicSq.[^1][^3] + +### The Vance-Masters Parallel and the Recruitment Pattern + +The Masters and Vance campaigns together were the Thiel network's electoral deployment in the 2022 cycle. Thiel spent approximately fifteen million dollars on the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC supporting Vance in Ohio and an additional fifteen million dollars on the Saving Arizona PAC super PAC supporting Masters in Arizona, for a total 2022-cycle deployment of approximately thirty-two million dollars. [[CNBC]] reported the combined figure in November 2022. Both candidates came from inside the Thiel commercial orbit: Vance from [[Mithril Capital]] and [[Narya Capital]], Masters from Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation. The Vance campaign produced a sitting senator who became vice president in 2025; the Masters campaign lost the November 2022 general election to Mark Kelly by approximately five percentage points.[^5][^6][^7] + +The Saving Arizona PAC was funded almost entirely by Thiel, with additional contributions from the cryptocurrency billionaires [[Cameron Winklevoss|Cameron]] and [[Tyler Winklevoss|Tyler Winklevoss]], who joined the effort in June 2022 per [[Forbes]] reporting. Thiel added a reported 1.5 million dollars in July 2022 as the primary approached, and the PAC resumed general-election spending in September 2022 after a period in which Thiel was reported to be hesitant about continued funding. The [[Federal Election Commission]] raised questions about the PAC's disclosure of its spending, documented in the [[Arizona Mirror]] reporting on the FEC inquiry. The Winklevoss cofunding extended the documented donor network beyond Thiel himself into the broader crypto-and-tech-billionaire cohort that overlaps with the [[PayPal Mafia]] and Thiel-network commercial orbit.[^6][^7][^8] + +The pattern of the deployment, with a single donor capitalizing ideologically aligned operatives placed into Senate primaries, is documented across the Protect Ohio Values and Saving Arizona PAC Federal Election Commission filings and in the contemporaneous [[Politico]] and [[OpenSecrets]] reporting. The two campaigns ran in parallel under the same Thiel strategy: identify operatives inside the commercial orbit, capitalize their primaries through a dedicated super PAC, and convert the commercial-network relationship into an elected-office relationship. Vance won the Senate seat and then the vice presidency, while Masters won his primary but lost the general election in a competitive state.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Blake Masters biography, drawn from public records, corporate filings, and contemporaneous campaign coverage. See *Arizona Mirror* and *Axios* reporting on the 2022 campaign. +[^2]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. +[^3]: 2022 Arizona U.S. Senate election results, Arizona Secretary of State and contemporaneous press, November 2022. +[^4]: Thiel Fellowship. Official program site. https://thielfellowship.org/ +[^5]: "A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel's big risk: How J.D. Vance won the Ohio primary." *Politico,* May 3, 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/03/jd-vance-win-ohio-primary-00029881 +[^6]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ +[^7]: "Peter Thiel's picks Masters, Vance split key Senate races in Arizona, Ohio." *CNBC,* November 12, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/12/midterm-results-peter-thiel-picks-masters-vance-see-mixed-results-in-arizona-ohio.html ; "Thiel drops another $1.5M for Masters." *Politico,* July 22, 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/22/peter-thiel-arizona-senate-campaign-00047536 +[^8]: "Winklevoss Twins Team Up With Peter Thiel To Support Arizona Senate Candidate Blake Masters." *Forbes,* June 30, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2022/06/30/winklevoss-twins-team-up-with-peter-thiel-to-support-arizona-senate-candidate-blake-masters/ ; "The FEC has questions about how a PAC backing Blake Masters is disclosing its spending." *Arizona Mirror.* https://azmirror.com/briefs/the-fec-has-questions-about-how-a-pac-backing-blake-masters-is-disclosing-its-spending/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Cecile de Jongh.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Cecile de Jongh.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e8a20615 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Cecile de Jongh.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - VirginIslands + - GovernmentCapture + - SouthernTrust + - TaxFraud + - SexOffender +alias: + - Cecile Galiber de Jongh + - Cecile R. de Jongh +summary: "Cecile de Jongh was the First Lady of the U.S. Virgin Islands from 2007 to 2015 and the office manager of Jeffrey Epstein's territorial companies, whom court filings later cast as his primary conduit for spreading money and influence through the territory's government." +location: "St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Cecile de Jongh (born Cecile Galiber) was the office manager of [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein's]] [[U.S. Virgin Islands]] entities, including [[Financial Trust Company]] and its successor [[Southern Trust Company]], a position she held from 2007 to 2015. During the same years her husband, [[John de Jongh]], served as the territory's seventh governor, making her the First Lady of the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]]. A January 2020 civil enforcement complaint by the Virgin Islands [[Denise George|Attorney General]], and later filings by [[JPMorgan Chase]] in related litigation, alleged that she used her dual position to manage Epstein's local affairs, influence territorial legislation, and direct his money toward officials while he was a registered sex offender.[^1][^2] + +### Position and Compensation + +De Jongh worked as the office manager of Epstein's Virgin Islands companies from 2007, the year her husband took office, through 2015, the year his term ended. JPMorgan's filings stated that she earned more than 200,000 dollars in compensation in 2007 alone for the role. The companies that employed her, Financial Trust Company and later Southern Trust Company, were the entities through which Epstein held his territorial tax benefits under the [[Economic Development Commission]] program and through which his Virgin Islands operations were funded.[^1][^2] + +The same filings alleged that Epstein paid tuition for de Jongh's children, that she forwarded her children's tuition bills to him for payment, and that she requested he help fund her husband's re-election campaign. In her May 2023 deposition, taken at the Ritz-Carlton on St. Thomas over roughly five and a half hours, de Jongh described confronting Epstein after his 2006 Florida arrest, saying she looked him in the eye and asked what was going on, and was assured it was a one-time mistake that would not recur. The arrangement continued after Epstein registered as a sex offender following his 2008 Florida plea.[^2][^3] + +The employment overlapped entirely with her public role. While serving as First Lady from 2007 to 2015, she simultaneously drew her salary from Epstein's companies, an overlap that was reported contemporaneously and that became the foundation of the later allegations. The settlement that resolved the Virgin Islands case against the Epstein estate included language shielding Epstein employees from civil liability, and no charges were brought against de Jongh personally.[^2][^4] + +### Alleged Influence on Territorial Government + +JPMorgan's 2023 court filings described de Jongh as Epstein's "primary conduit for spreading money and influence throughout the USVI government." According to those filings, in 2011 she emailed Epstein proposed language for legislation increasing sex-offender monitoring, asking, "This is the suggested language; will it work for you?" The bank alleged that after a monitoring bill passed she wrote that "all is not lost and we will figure something out by coming up with a game plan to get around these obstacles." The draft she circulated concerned the section of the Virgin Islands Code governing the travel and reporting requirements imposed on registered sex offenders.[^2][^5] + +The filings further alleged that de Jongh advised Epstein on how to "buy control of the USVI political class," coordinated meetings between him and commissioners, senators, and gubernatorial candidates, recommended placing a sitting senator on a monthly retainer for loyalty and access, and tracked which candidates he funded. They alleged she helped secure student visas for young women connected to Epstein by arranging their enrollment in classes at the [[University of the Virgin Islands]] to provide cover for their presence in the territory, and that she offered to have someone else sign tuition letters so that the registered sex offender's signature would not appear on the paperwork. She was also alleged to have worked with the [[Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority]] to keep Epstein's companies in compliance so the tax benefits continued, and to have guided his charitable donations to satisfy program requirements.[^2][^5] + +These allegations originate in the Virgin Islands Attorney General's complaint and in JPMorgan's filings, the latter of which the territory characterized as hyperbole offered to deflect the bank's own liability for failing to report suspicious activity. De Jongh did not respond to requests for comment when the filings were unsealed in 2023. The allegations describe a pattern of conduct rather than any criminal adjudication, and she was never charged.[^2][^4] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "Virgin Islands governor's wife employed by convicted sex-offender billionaire." *The Daily Caller,* April 22, 2012. https://dailycaller.com/2012/04/22/virgin-islands-governors-wife-employed-by-convicted-sex-offender-billionaire/ +[^2]: "JPMorgan alleges wife of U.S. Virgin Islands' ex-governor aided Jeffrey Epstein's criminal activity." *NBC News,* May 24, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jpmorgan-alleges-ex-virgin-islands-first-lady-aided-jeffrey-epstein-rcna86365 +[^3]: "Cecile de Jongh Testifies She Confronted Epstein After His 2006 Arrest." *St. Thomas Source,* July 26, 2023. https://stthomassource.com/content/2023/07/26/cecile-de-jongh-testifies-she-confronted-epstein-after-his-2006-arrest/ +[^4]: "JPMorgan Chase says Jeffrey Epstein paid tuition for kids of U.S. Virgin Islands governor." *CNBC,* May 25, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-jeffrey-epstein-paid-tuition-for-kids-of-virgin-islands-governor.html +[^5]: "JPMorgan accuses wife of former Virgin Islands governor of aiding Epstein." *Fortune,* May 25, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-jeffrey-epstein-virgin-islands-first-lady-sex-trafficking-de-jongh ; Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y. 2022). diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles C. Johnson.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles C. Johnson.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ce673dce --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles C. Johnson.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - CharlesJohnson + - ClearviewAI + - PeterThiel + - FBIInformant + - AltRight + - FederalInformant +alias: + - Charles C. Johnson + - Chuck Johnson +summary: "Charles C. Johnson is a far-right provocateur and self-described federal informant who claimed cofounder status at Clearview AI alongside Peter Thiel's seed investment, disclosed Thiel's status as an FBI confidential human source in 2023, and was sued in 2024 for falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent." +born: 1988-10-22 +location: "Boston, Massachusetts (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Charles C. Johnson (born October 22, 1988) is an American far-right media figure, self-described federal informant, and technology investor. The *New York Times* reported in March 2021 that Johnson played a pivotal early role in the founding of [[Clearview AI]] alongside [[Peter Thiel]]'s seed investment. Johnson disclosed Thiel's status as an [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] confidential human source in 2023, per *Business Insider* reporting, and was sued in October 2024 for falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent while "running a fraud and extortion scheme."[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Far-Right Media Career + +Johnson built his public profile through a series of far-right provocations across the 2013-2017 period. He operated the [[GotNews|GotNews]] website and published [[The Truth About the IRS Scandal|The Truth About the IRS Scandal]] (2013), and he promoted a range of debunked conspiracy theories, including the false claim that President [[Barack Obama|Obama]]'s National Security Advisor [[Susan Rice|Susan Rice]] had directed surveillance of the [[Donald Trump|Trump]] campaign. Johnson was banned from [[Twitter]] in 2015 (one of the first high-profile permanent bans) after requesting funds to "take out" a [[Black Lives Matter|Black Lives Matter]] activist.[^1][^4] + +In 2017 Johnson announced he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads," which *Byline Supplement* reported as part of the Clearview AI prehistory. The work sits in the same identity-from-public-data category that Clearview AI would subsequently commercialize, and the Clearview founding in 2016-2017 overlaps with the period of Johnson's deportation-algorithm work.[^5] + +### The Clearview AI Cofounder Claim + +The *New York Times* reported in March 2021 that Johnson played a pivotal early role in the founding of Clearview AI alongside Peter Thiel, who provided the seed funding for the company before it was even named (the [[Smart Checker]] period). Johnson subsequently claimed cofounder status and sued Clearview for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025. The legal record of the suit, and its subsequent withdrawal, is documented in the *Biometric Update* reporting (February 2025) and the *Yahoo Finance* / *Toronto Star* coverage.[^1][^6][^7] + +Johnson's relationship to Thiel extends beyond Clearview. *Business Insider* reported in October 2023 that Johnson had disclosed Thiel's status as an FBI confidential human source, and that Johnson himself was described in the reporting as "a tech investor and far-right agitator with long-standing ties to both Thiel and to the network."[^2] + +### The Federal Informant Claims and the Fraud Suit + +Johnson has stated publicly that he was a federal informant. The federal lawsuit against Clearview AI over Johnson's cofounder claim recorded his indication that he was a federal informant, and the *Semafor* reporting (October 2024) documented a separate lawsuit alleging Johnson was "running a fraud and extortion scheme" and falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent. The suit was brought by a business partner and alleged that Johnson had used the false intelligence-agent presentation to extract payments and concessions.[^3][^6] + +The documented pattern combines three roles: the far-right media provocateur (the GotNews period), the technology investor and Clearview cofounder claimant (the 2016-2025 period), and the federal informant / intelligence-agent presenter (the ongoing period). The three roles overlap in Johnson's documented relationship with Thiel and in the broader network of far-right operatives, technology investors, and federal law-enforcement contacts that the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel network]] intersects.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Jonathan Buma Thread + +The *[[Business Insider|Business Insider]]* reporting on Thiel's FBI informant status referenced the [[Jonathan Buma|Jonathan Buma]] case. Buma, the Los Angeles FBI counterintelligence agent who handled Thiel as a CHS from summer 2021, was arrested at [[John F. Kennedy International Airport|JFK Airport]] on March 17, 2025 while attempting to board an international flight, charged with unlawfully disclosing confidential information. [[CBS News|CBS News]] reported that FBI investigators assessed Buma may have compromised as many as 130 FBI files.[^2] + +Buma publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias and disclosed GRU targeting of [[Elon Musk|Musk]] and Thiel. The [[The Guardian|Guardian]] reported Buma's claim in May 2025 that Russian-intelligence efforts to target Musk were "intense," and that the [[GRU|GRU]] operation exploited vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access. The [[Igor Kurganov|Kurganov]] infiltration of Musk's inner circle (documented separately) is the concrete instance of the targeting Buma described.[^2] + +The Buma-Thiel-Johnson triangle involves three documented roles: Buma as the FBI handler who managed Thiel as a CHS, Thiel as the billionaire source whose FBI relationship Johnson disclosed, and Johnson as the far-right operative who connected the Thiel commercial network to the federal informant infrastructure and to the Clearview surveillance-technology founding. The full content of Buma's disclosures is part of the ongoing congressional and Inspector General review of the FBI's source program. A House Judiciary Committee document submitted January 22, 2026 references Thiel's CHS role.[^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "What We Learned About Clearview AI's Hidden 'Co-Founder.'" *New York Times,* March 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/technology/clearview-facial-recognition-ai.html +[^2]: "Exclusive: Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Was an FBI Informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10 +[^3]: "Business Partner Sues Chuck Johnson for Falsely Presenting as Intelligence Agent." *Semafor,* October 16, 2024. https://www.semafor.com/article/10/16/2024/business-partner-sues-chuck-johnson-for-falsely-presenting-as-intelligence-agent +[^4]: For Johnson's far-right media career, the GotNews operation, the Susan Rice surveillance claim, and the 2015 Twitter ban, see the contemporaneous press coverage. +[^5]: "The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped..." *Byline Supplement.* https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/the-neo-nazi-enforcer-who-helped +[^6]: "Legal battle over Clearview AI's origin takes a turn as accuser drops suit." *Biometric Update,* February 2025. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202502/legal-battle-over-clearview-ais-origin-takes-a-turn-as-accuser-drops-suit +[^7]: "CEO of Clearview AI has been ousted." *Yahoo Finance / Toronto Star.* https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-clearview-ai-controversial-facial-211716034.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles Murray.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles Murray.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fc07f6d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Charles Murray.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - CharlesMurray + - HumanBiodiversity + - RaceScience + - Conservatism + - AEI +summary: "Charles Murray is an American political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute whose 1994 book The Bell Curve argued that intelligence is largely hereditary and varies by race, a thesis widely condemned as scientific racism that became foundational to the human-biodiversity current in the rationalist and tech-right milieus." +born: 1943-01-08 +location: "Burkittsville, Maryland" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Charles Murray (born January 8, 1943) is an American political scientist and a longtime fellow of the [[American Enterprise Institute]] whose work on intelligence, class, and welfare made him the most prominent academic exponent of hereditarian claims about race and IQ in the United States. His 1994 book *The Bell Curve*, written with the Harvard psychologist [[Richard Herrnstein]], argued that intelligence is substantially heritable, that it predicts life outcomes better than socioeconomic background, and that measured IQ differences between racial groups have a partly genetic basis. The book was widely condemned as scientific racism, and it became a foundational text for the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] current that later circulated through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the tech-right.[^1][^2] + +### Losing Ground and Welfare Reform + +Murray's 1984 book *Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980* argued that the Great Society welfare programs had not reduced poverty but had eroded the initiative of the poor and made dependency a rational choice. It became a foundational text of the conservative case against welfare, and Murray advised on the [[Wisconsin]] welfare overhaul under Governor [[Tommy Thompson]]; the book's thesis fed the 1996 federal welfare-reform law. *Losing Ground* proposed scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-age people, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and the argument was later credited as intellectual groundwork for President [[Bill Clinton|Clinton]]'s pledge to "end welfare as we know it."[^5][^7] + +The book was a product of the conservative funding apparatus. The [[Manhattan Institute]] sponsored and promoted *Losing Ground*, with Murray serving as a senior fellow there from 1982 to 1990, and the [[Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation|Bradley Foundation]] underwrote much of his work both at the Manhattan Institute and after he moved to the American Enterprise Institute in 1990. The Manhattan Institute parted ways with Murray after he began work on what became *The Bell Curve*, and his subsequent books at AEI included *Human Accomplishment* (2003), *Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010* (2012), and the genetics defense *Human Diversity* (2020).[^8] + +### The Bell Curve + +*The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life* contended that a "cognitive elite" sorted by intelligence was stratifying American society and that policy should accommodate innate differences in ability. Its most contested chapters addressed average IQ differences between racial groups and suggested a genetic contribution. In the book's afterword Murray acknowledged citing thirteen scholars who had received money from the [[Pioneer Fund]], a foundation founded in 1937 by [[Wickliffe Draper]] to promote "race betterment" and classified as a hate group by the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]], which has bankrolled the race-and-intelligence research network around the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]]. Reviewers across psychology and the social sciences concluded that the authors had produced no valid evidence that group IQ gaps are genetic in origin. Herrnstein died of cancer in September 1994, shortly before publication.[^1][^2][^6] + +The book's defenders mounted a public-relations campaign in its support. On December 13, 1994, the psychologist [[Linda Gottfredson]] published a statement titled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" in *The Wall Street Journal*, signed by 52 researchers, asserting that the hereditarian view represented scientific consensus; the SPLC later reported that at least 20 of the signatories had received Pioneer Fund money, including Gottfredson and the future fund presidents [[J. Philippe Rushton]] and [[Richard Lynn]]. The American Psychological Association responded by convening a task force chaired by [[Ulric Neisser]], whose 1996 report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" concluded that there was no direct evidence for a genetic explanation of the black-white test-score gap. The paleontologist [[Stephen Jay Gould]], reprising arguments from his 1981 book *The Mismeasure of Man*, attacked the book's reliance on a single general-intelligence factor in a widely read *New Yorker* review.[^9][^10] + +### Reputation and Rehabilitation + +Murray was protested as a racist for decades, including a 2017 confrontation at [[Middlebury College]] that turned violent, and the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him as a promoter of racist pseudoscience. Within the technology and rationalist world, however, he was reframed as a victim of taboo, a martyr of "forbidden knowledge." The neuroscientist and podcaster [[Sam Harris]], a registrant of the [[Dialog]] society, hosted Murray in a 2017 episode titled "Forbidden Knowledge" that presented his race-and-IQ claims as suppressed truth, and the blog [[Scott Alexander|Slate Star Codex]] and the broader human-biodiversity discourse treated his hereditarian framework as a serious object of debate. The valorization of such suppressed-knowledge claims is the same posture that the [[Hereticon]] "conference for thoughtcrime" markets.[^3][^4] + +The Middlebury episode of March 2, 2017 became a national reference point in campus free-speech debates. Students shouted down Murray's scheduled talk, forcing him and the political-science professor [[Allison Stanger]] into a separate room to record the lecture, and as the pair left the building a crowd that included masked outsiders mobbed them, pulled Stanger's hair, and shoved her; she was treated for a concussion. Middlebury later disciplined dozens of students. Murray accepted a steady stream of conservative honors during the same years, including the Bradley Foundation's $250,000 Bradley Prize in 2016, which kept him embedded in the institutional right even as mainstream academic associations distanced themselves from his race-and-IQ work.[^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.* Free Press, 1994. +[^2]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the book's claims, the Pioneer Fund sourcing, and the scientific response. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/ +[^3]: "Charles Murray," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the scientific-racism classification and the Middlebury protest. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray +[^4]: Harris, Sam. "Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray," *Making Sense* podcast, April 2017. +[^5]: "Charles Murray and the Power of Mainstream Media Amnesia," Center for American Progress, on *Losing Ground* and its welfare-policy influence. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-charles-murray-and-the-power-of-mainstream-media-amnesia/ +[^6]: "Pioneer Fund," SourceWatch, on the fund's 1937 founding, eugenics mission, and support for the Bell Curve-cited scholars and Mankind Quarterly. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund +[^7]: "Losing Ground," Manhattan Institute, on the book's 1984 publication, sponsorship, and proposal to scrap federal income-support programs. https://manhattan.institute/book/losing-ground +[^8]: "Charles Murray: A Life," American Enterprise Institute, and "Charles Murray," Bradley Foundation, on his 1982-1990 Manhattan Institute tenure, the 1990 move to AEI, Bradley funding, and the later books. https://www.aei.org/multimedia/charles-murray-a-life/ +[^9]: "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," Linda Gottfredson, *The Wall Street Journal,* December 13, 1994, and Southern Poverty Law Center reporting that at least 20 signatories received Pioneer Fund money. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994WSJmainstream.pdf +[^10]: Neisser, Ulric, et al. "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns," *American Psychologist,* 1996, the APA task-force report finding no direct evidence for a genetic basis of the black-white test-score gap; Gould, Stephen Jay, "Curveball," *The New Yorker,* November 28, 1994. +[^11]: "Protesters injure Middlebury professor escorting controversial speaker," VTDigger, March 3, 2017, on the Stanger concussion and the March 2 confrontation; "Charles Murray," Bradley Foundation, on the 2016 Bradley Prize. https://vtdigger.org/2017/03/03/protesters-injure-middlebury-professor-escorting-controversial-speaker/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Curtis Lind.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Curtis Lind.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..da60f3cb --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Curtis Lind.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +category: "Other" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Violence + - Vallejo +summary: "Curtis Lind was a Vallejo landlord who rented property to members of the Zizian group, survived a 2022 sword attack in which he killed one assailant in self-defense, and was stabbed to death in January 2025 shortly before he was due to testify against the group." +died: 2025-01-17 +location: "Vallejo, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Curtis Lind was an octogenarian landlord in [[Vallejo]], [[California]], who rented lot space to members of the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group living in box trucks and vans, and who became the central surviving witness in the criminal cases against them before he was killed in January 2025. Lind survived a 2022 attack in which he was impaled with a sword and lost an eye, killing one of his assailants in self-defense, and was stabbed to death two and a half years later shortly before he was scheduled to testify.[^1][^2] + +### The 2022 Attack + +By autumn 2022 [[Jack LaSota]] and several followers were living in vehicles on Lind's property on Lemon Street in Vallejo. Lind had gone to court to evict the tenants for nonpayment of rent, and on November 15, 2022, two days before the eviction deadline, the dispute escalated into violence: members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him his right eye. Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed [[Emma Borhanian]], a longtime LaSota associate, surviving the attack. [[Alexander Leatham]], who used the name "Somni," and [[Suri Dao]] were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind.[^1][^3] + +Lind's injuries were extensive enough to require about a month of hospitalization, with roughly fifty puncture wounds, a sword wound through his chest, facial lacerations, and the loss of the eye. Investigators concluded he had acted in self-defense in killing Borhanian and brought no charges against him for it. The case against his attackers rested heavily on his testimony, since prosecutors said it lacked surveillance footage, ballistics, or social-media evidence, which left the elderly survivor as the sole eyewitness when the matter headed toward an April 2025 trial.[^1][^3] + +### The 2025 Killing + +On January 17, 2025, Lind was stabbed and his throat was cut on his Lemon Street property near the site of the 2022 attack, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. [[Solano County]] prosecutors charged [[Maximilian Snyder]], a former [[University of Oxford]] student connected to the group, with Lind's murder, alleging the killing was carried out to prevent his testimony. Lind's killing came three days before the Zizian-linked shooting of Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]] in [[Vermont]].[^2][^4] + +The Solano County complaint charged the killing with a special circumstance, alleging that "the victim, C.L., was a witness to a crime" and "was intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding," an allegation that exposes Snyder to a possible death sentence under California law. Snyder was arrested on January 24, 2025 by Redding Police Department officers and taken to the Solano County Jail in Fairfield, where he was held without bail. With Lind dead, the prosecution of his 2022 attackers lost the witness on whom it had depended, and the timing, days before the Vermont stop, became one of the first threads investigators used to connect the California and Vermont cases.[^2][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/ +[^2]: "Federal grand jury indicts Zizian namesake with Vallejo ties," *Open Vallejo,* June 20, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/06/20/federal-grand-jury-indicts-zizian-namesake-with-vallejo-ties/ +[^3]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/ +[^4]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^5]: "Alleged Zizians follower pleads not guilty to murdering Vallejo landlord," KRON4, March 2025; on the Lemon Street property, the special-circumstance allegation and quoted complaint, and Snyder's January 24 arrest in Redding. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/alleged-zizians-follower-pleads-not-guilty-to-murdering-vallejo-landlord/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Dustin Moskovitz.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Dustin Moskovitz.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e242b0f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Dustin Moskovitz.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Philanthropists & Benefactors" +tags: + - Person + - DustinMoskovitz + - Facebook + - EffectiveAltruism + - OpenPhilanthropy + - DemocraticDonor +summary: "Dustin Moskovitz is a cofounder of Facebook and the software firm Asana who, with his wife Cari Tuna, became the largest sustained funder of effective altruism through Open Philanthropy and one of the largest Democratic political donors, a political mirror image of his fellow Facebook beneficiary Peter Thiel." +born: 1984-05-22 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Dustin Moskovitz (born May 22, 1984) is an American technology entrepreneur who cofounded [[Facebook]] with [[Mark Zuckerberg]] in 2004 and later cofounded the workplace-software company [[Asana]]. With his wife [[Cari Tuna]] he became the largest sustained funder of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement through [[Open Philanthropy]] and one of the largest Democratic political donors in the United States. His career traces the same Facebook fortune that made [[Peter Thiel]], the company's first outside investor, a billionaire, and his philanthropy and politics run in the opposite direction from Thiel's.[^1][^2] + +### Facebook and Asana + +Moskovitz was Zuckerberg's roommate at [[Harvard University]] and one of Facebook's founding team, serving as its first chief technology officer and head of engineering. He left in 2008 to cofound Asana with [[Justin Rosenstein]], took the company public in 2020, and built a second fortune; his net worth, derived chiefly from his early Facebook stake, exceeds sixteen billion dollars. He stepped down as Asana chief executive in March 2025 while remaining chairman.[^1][^3] + +Moskovitz retained roughly two percent of Facebook at its 2012 initial public offering, a stake worth several billion dollars that became the foundation of his wealth and his giving. Asana took its name from a yoga term and went public by direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020. His March 2025 retirement announcement, in which he said he would transition out of the chief-executive role, was followed by a sharp drop in Asana's share price; he stayed on as board chair and remained the company's largest shareholder.[^1][^3] + +### Open Philanthropy and Effective Altruism + +In 2011 Moskovitz and Tuna founded Good Ventures, and they later joined with the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]] to create Open Philanthropy, which became the principal sustained financier of effective altruism, longtermism, and AI-safety work, directing more than four billion dollars in grants. The funding flowed to the same AI-risk research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] that [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] and [[Nick Bostrom]] built, and Open Philanthropy was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]]. Moskovitz signed the Giving Pledge, committing the majority of his wealth.[^2][^4] + +Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grantmaking, making the foundation's reach a direct function of Moskovitz and Tuna's fortune; the organization's own analysis acknowledged that the movement's funding base rests heavily on the couple. Open Philanthropy's 2017 grant of 30 million dollars to [[OpenAI]] came with a board seat for co-chief-executive [[Holden Karnofsky]], an early instance of the foundation embedding itself inside an AI lab, and it later invested in Anthropic. Operating from November 2025 as Coefficient Giving, the organization began pooling money from outside donors so that other philanthropists could fund its cause areas alongside Good Ventures.[^2][^4] + +### Political Giving + +Moskovitz became one of the largest individual donors to Democratic causes, an explicit counterweight to right-wing megadonors. He and Tuna pledged roughly twenty million dollars to defeat [[Donald Trump]] and elect [[Hillary Clinton]] in 2016, and in 2020 he gave approximately ninety-two million dollars to the Democratic super PAC [[Future Forward]], among the largest single contributions of the cycle, followed by further giving to the same vehicle in 2024. The pattern is the inverse of Thiel's funding of Trump, [[JD Vance]], and the tech-right: two beneficiaries of the same company financing opposed political projects, while both poured money into the competing wings of the AI-risk debate.[^5][^6] + +In the 2024 cycle Moskovitz gave 38 million dollars to Future Forward, the main super PAC backing [[Kamala Harris]], plus 929,600 dollars to the Biden Victory Fund, ranking among Harris's largest billionaire donors. The 2016 effort was bipartisan in intent: Moskovitz wrote that his roughly twenty-million-dollar commitment was meant to counter what he saw as the danger of a Trump presidency, the first time he and Tuna had given at that scale to electoral politics. He has framed his political spending in the same expected-value terms as his philanthropy, treating elections as high-stakes interventions on the same metric of marginal impact that governs Open Philanthropy's grants.[^5][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Facebook Co-Founder Moskovitz Builds a Second Fortune With Asana," *Bloomberg,* October 1, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-01/facebook-co-founder-moskovitz-builds-a-second-fortune-with-asana +[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures funding. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^3]: "Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz announces retirement," *CNBC,* March 10, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/asana-ceo-dustin-moskovitz-announces-retirement-stock-price-drops-25percent.html +[^4]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^5]: "Clinton campaign and Dems get $20M from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz," *TechCrunch,* September 8, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/08/a-friend-of-hillary +[^6]: "Future Forward PAC," InfluenceWatch, on the approximately ninety-two million dollar 2020 contribution and the 2024 giving. https://www.influencewatch.org/political-party/future-forward-pac/ +[^7]: "Trump, Harris' Top Billionaire Donors in 2024 Election," *Bloomberg,* and "Billionaires poured millions of dollars into presidential super PACs," *NBC News,* 2024, on the 38-million-dollar Future Forward gift and the 929,600-dollar Biden Victory Fund contribution. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-billionaire-donors-us-election/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Elon Musk.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Elon Musk.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..832df076 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Elon Musk.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - ElonMusk + - PayPalMafia + - Tesla + - SpaceX + - Dialog + - JeffreyEpstein + - Russia + - X + - Starlink +alias: + - Elon Reeve Musk +summary: "Elon Musk is a South African-born American billionaire who cofounded PayPal, founded SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X (Twitter), is a PayPal Mafia principal and 2026 Dialog retreat registrant, attended the 2015 Epstein dinner, and has been in documented regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late 2022 while running the Starlink satellite network operationally significant to the Russia-Ukraine war." +born: 1971-06-28 +location: "Pretoria, South Africa (born); Austin, Texas (base)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971, in [[Pretoria]], [[South Africa]]) is a billionaire technology founder who cofounded the company that merged into [[PayPal]], founded [[SpaceX]] and [[Tesla, Inc.|Tesla]], acquired [[X (social media)|X (formerly Twitter)]] in 2022, and operates [[Starlink|Starlink]], the satellite-internet constellation whose terminals have been operationally significant in the [[Russia|Russia]]-[[Ukraine|Ukraine]] war. Musk is a [[PayPal Mafia|PayPal Mafia]] principal, a 2026 [[Dialog]] retreat registrant per the leaked *WIRED* roster, a documented attendee at the 2015 Jeffrey Epstein dinner (EFTA00344556), and has been in regular contact with [[Vladimir Putin|Vladimir Putin]] since late 2022 per [[Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] reporting. The documented Russian-intelligence targeting of Musk, his platform-policy decisions at X, and his operational control of Starlink's Ukraine coverage together constitute the documented set of intersections between Musk's activities and the U.S. national-security posture.[^1][^2][^3][^4] + +### The PayPal Mafia and the Founding Period + +Musk founded the online-banking company [[X.com|X.com]] in 1999 with capital from his [[Zip2|Zip2]] sale proceeds. [[Peter Thiel]]'s [[Confinity]] had launched its own person-to-person payments product around the same time, and the two companies entered direct competition that produced a mutually destructive customer-acquisition war. The [[eBay|eBay]] board pressured both companies to merge, and the X.com/Confinity merger closed in 2000, with Musk as the combined entity's largest shareholder and chief executive. Thiel became chairman.[^1][^5] + +Musk's tenure as CEO lasted approximately six months. In September 2000, while Musk was on his honeymoon, the PayPal board (led by Thiel) voted to replace Musk as chief executive with Thiel. The board coup was documented in the subsequent reporting and in [[Jimmy Soni|Jimmy Soni's]] book *[[The Founders|The Founders]]* (2022). Musk accepted the decision, remained the largest shareholder, and backed Thiel's leadership through the February 2002 initial public offering and the October 2002 sale to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars. Musk's PayPal proceeds funded the SpaceX founding in 2002 and the Tesla investment in 2004.[^1][^5] + +The PayPal cohort subsequently labeled the PayPal Mafia dispersed into the next generation of Silicon Valley companies. Six members of the PayPal Mafia appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, including both Musk and Thiel. The board-coup history (Thiel replacing Musk as CEO) and the subsequent Dialog co-attendance (both at the same off-the-record retreat) together document a relationship that combined documented conflict with continuing commercial and convening alignment across a 25-year period.[^1][^5] + +### SpaceX, Starlink, and the Ukraine War + +SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, developed the [[Falcon|Falcon]] rocket family and the [[Dragon (spacecraft)|Dragon]] capsule under NASA and Department of Defense contracts. Starlink, the SpaceX satellite-internet constellation, began operational deployment in 2019 and became operationally significant in the Russia-Ukraine war after February 2022, when Ukrainian forces and civilians used Starlink terminals for communications after the Russian destruction of the terrestrial infrastructure.[^4][^6] + +Musk's personal control over Starlink's geographic coverage produced a situation in which a single private individual controlled a strategic military capability. In September 2023, Musk refused a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink coverage over [[Crimea|Crimea]] for a drone attack on the Russian fleet at [[Sevastopol|Sevastopol]], which biographer [[Walter Isaacson|Walter Isaacson]] documented and which Musk publicly confirmed. The refusal, framed by Musk as preventing an act of war, placed the founder of a private company in the operational decision chain over a combat-zone capability that the U.S. government had not directly controlled.[^6][^7] + +The Starlink operational question ran alongside the documented Putin contact channel (since late 2022, per the Wall Street Journal October 25, 2024 reporting). The combination of Musk's control over the Ukraine communications infrastructure, the Putin contact channel, and the [[Jonathan Buma|Buma]]-documented GRU targeting of Musk has sustained the public question of whether the Starlink operational decisions were influenced by the Putin relationship. Musk has denied any such influence.[^4][^6][^7] + +### The Dialog Registration and the 2015 Epstein Dinner + +Musk appears on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, per *WIRED*'s reporting on the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]]'s publication of the Dialog membership directory and the separately provided registration list.[^1] + +The document releases (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) document that Musk attended an August 2015 dinner that [[Reid Hoffman]] hosted in [[Palo Alto]] to raise money for the [[MIT Media Lab]]. The guest list included Peter Thiel, [[Mark Zuckerberg]], [[Joi Ito]], and [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]]. The dinner was documented in the [[Epstein Files|Epstein file]] releases and indexed in the Carstensen aggregator. The 2015 dinner is seven years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement.[^1][^5][^8] + +Musk has stated publicly that he attended the dinner because Epstein promised to introduce him to someone, and that he left early. The documented co-presence of Musk, Thiel, Hoffman, Zuckerberg, and Ito at a single Epstein-mediated dinner places five PayPal Mafia and Silicon Valley principals at the same table as the registered sex offender. The Hoffman image-rehabilitation apology (September 2019) covers the broader pattern of Hoffman's Epstein contacts that the 2015 dinner is one documented instance of.[^1][^5][^8] + +### The Putin Contacts and the Russian-Targeting Question + +The Wall Street Journal reported on October 25, 2024 that Musk had been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022, a relationship that began after Starlink became operationally significant in the Russia-Ukraine war. The contact channel ran through the period of Musk's X acquisition (October 2022), his documented shifts in platform-content moderation toward the post-2022 Russian-state position on the war, and the September 2023 Starlink-Crimea refusal.[^3][^4] + +Former FBI agent Jonathan Buma disclosed in May 2025 (per [[The Guardian]]) that Russian-intelligence efforts to target Musk were "intense," and the [[Kyiv Post|Kyiv Post]] reporting on Buma's interview characterized the operation as [[GRU|GRU]]-run, Putin-approved, and exploiting vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access. The [[Igor Kurganov|Igor Kurganov]] infiltration, documented separately, is the concrete instance: a Russian-born former professional poker player who gained operational access to Musk's philanthropic decision-making and residential life before being removed by wealth manager [[Jared Birchall]] in May 2022.[^4][^9][^10] + +### The X Acquisition and Platform Policy + +Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 for 44 billion dollars and renamed it X. The acquisition and the subsequent platform-policy changes (the restoration of previously banned accounts, the reduction of content-moderation teams, the documented shift in the platform's enforcement posture toward the Russian-state and far-right positions) produced the documented instance at which a single individual controlled a major U.S. communications platform while simultaneously in contact with Putin and while his own companies (SpaceX, Tesla) operated under federal regulatory jurisdiction.[^3][^4] + +Musk has denied that his activities have been influenced by Russian-state interests.[^3][^4][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, "Peter Thiel," cross-referencing EFTA00344556 and EFTA00344564 (2015 dinner guest list). https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^3]: For the Musk-Putin contact reporting, see the *Wall Street Journal* October 25, 2024 report on regular contact since late 2022. +[^4]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia +[^5]: Soni, Jimmy. *The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.* Simon and Schuster, 2022, documenting the X.com/Confinity merger, the 2000 board vote replacing Musk with Thiel as CEO, and the dispersal of the PayPal cohort. +[^6]: For the SpaceX, Falcon, and Starlink record, see the company's published materials and the DoD and NASA contracting record. +[^7]: Isaacson, Walter. *Elon Musk.* Simon and Schuster, 2023. +[^8]: For the 2015 Epstein dinner, see EFTA00344556 and EFTA00344564, indexed in the Carstensen aggregator. +[^9]: "Russian Intelligence Used Sex, Drugs to Target Elon Musk." *Kyiv Post,* 2025. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/52742 +[^10]: For the Kurganov infiltration and the Birchall removal, see The Guardian May 2025 report and the Igor Kurganov page. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ghislaine Maxwell.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ghislaine Maxwell.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..53f872b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ghislaine Maxwell.md @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: + - Person + - GhislaineMaxwell + - JeffreyEpstein + - RobertMaxwell + - SexTrafficking + - Conviction + - Mossad +alias: + - Ghislaine Maxwell +summary: "Ghislaine Maxwell is the British socialite convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking of a minor for her role as Jeffrey Epstein's principal accomplice, daughter of the publishing mogul Robert Maxwell who was credibly alleged to have operated as a Mossad-connected intelligence asset, and the youngest of the Maxwell children whose family intelligence legacy has produced sustained reporting on whether the Epstein-Maxwell operation functioned as an intelligence-linked compromise operation." +born: 1961-12-25 +location: "Maisons-Laffitte, France (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Ghislaine Maxwell (born December 25, 1961, in [[Maisons-Laffitte|Maisons-Laffitte]], [[France|France]]) is the British socialite convicted on December 29, 2021 in the [[U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York|U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York]] on five of six federal counts including sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking of a minor, for her role as [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]]'s principal accomplice in the trafficking operation. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on June 28, 2022. She is the youngest daughter of the publishing mogul [[Robert Maxwell|Robert Maxwell]], who was credibly alleged across multiple documented sources to have operated as a [[Mossad|Mossad]]-connected intelligence asset, and whose family intelligence legacy has produced sustained reporting on whether the Epstein-Maxwell operation functioned as an intelligence-linked compromise operation.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Early Life and the Path to Epstein + +Ghislaine Maxwell was the youngest of the nine children of Robert Maxwell and the Holocaust scholar [[Elisabeth Maxwell|Elisabeth "Betty" Maxwell]], and was widely described as her father's favorite, the child after whom he named his yacht. She was educated at [[Marlborough College]] and [[Balliol College]], [[University of Oxford|Oxford]], and worked inside her father's business empire, taking public-facing roles connected to [[Oxford United]] football club and the newspaper The European. She moved in elite British and international social circles before her father's death.[^9] + +After Robert Maxwell drowned in November 1991 and his empire was found to have looted the Mirror Group pension funds, the family fortune and reputation collapsed, and Ghislaine relocated to New York. She reinvented herself there as a society fixer and met Epstein in the early 1990s. Their romantic relationship gave way to a working one in which she organized his households, staff, and social calendar, a role the 2021 trial identified as that of recruiter and procurer for the abuse operation.[^9] + +### The Conviction + +The federal trial in the Southern District of New York established that Maxwell was Epstein's "number two," who groomed and recruited underage girls (victims as young as 14), arranged travel for them across state lines, paid them to recruit additional victims, and normalized the abuse through her social position. Four victims testified under pseudonyms ("Jane," "Kate," "Carolyn," "Annie"). The jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts: conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor. The sixth count (perjury, related to a 2016 civil deposition) resulted in acquittal; those charges were subsequently dropped. The [[Second Circuit|Second Circuit]] denied Maxwell's appeal in September 2024.[^1][^4] + +The trial ran from November 29 to December 29, 2021, before Judge [[Alison Nathan|Alison J. Nathan]]; the jury of six women and six men deliberated about 40 hours across parts of six days before returning the verdict.[^6] Maxwell moved for a new trial on January 19, 2022 under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 33, after Juror No. 50 ("Scotty David") told media interviewers that his own childhood sexual abuse, which he had not disclosed on the jury questionnaire, had helped persuade fellow jurors; Nathan held an evidentiary hearing and denied the motion on April 1, 2022, finding the omission "highly unfortunate, but not deliberate" and the juror credibly unbiased.[^7] At the June 28, 2022 sentencing Nathan imposed an above-Guidelines term of 240 months, a five-year term of supervised release, and a 750,000 dollar fine; prosecutors did not seek restitution because the testifying victims had already been compensated through the Epstein Victim Compensation Program and civil settlements, and eight victims submitted impact statements, several reading them aloud.[^1] The Second Circuit affirmed on September 17, 2024 and denied rehearing on November 25, 2024.[^4] + +### The Recruitment Operation + +The trial record and victim accounts established Maxwell as the operation's recruiter and the figure who normalized the abuse. She approached adolescent girls in ordinary settings, spas, shopping areas, and schools, befriended them, and brought them to Epstein under the cover of paid "massage" work that escalated into sexual abuse. She recruited [[Virginia Giuffre]] around 2000, when Giuffre was a teenage locker-room attendant at [[Mar-a-Lago]]. The operation ran as a pyramid in which victims were paid to recruit further victims, multiplying the number of girls cycled through the houses.[^10] + +Maxwell exercised operational control over the physical network. She managed Epstein's residences (the Manhattan townhouse, the [[Palm Beach, Florida|Palm Beach]] house, [[Little St. James]] in the Virgin Islands, the New Mexico ranch, and the Paris apartment), directed household staff, and coordinated travel on Epstein's aircraft. She maintained the contact directory known as the "little black book," which listed hundreds of names; a former house manager, [[Alfredo Rodriguez]], later attempted to sell a copy and was convicted of obstruction. Flight logs and staff testimony placed her at the center of the logistics.[^10] + +Her social standing opened the doors the operation depended on. She introduced Epstein into circles that included British royalty and American political figures, among them [[Prince Andrew]] and [[Bill Clinton]], and hosted at the properties. A March 2001 photograph taken at Maxwell's London home showed Andrew with his arm around Giuffre and Maxwell in the background, an image central to Giuffre's later civil suit against Andrew. The 2024 unsealing of the [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] documents and the testimony of four pseudonymous accusers at the 2021 trial ("Jane," "Kate," "Carolyn," and "Annie") detailed the mechanics of how the recruitment and abuse were carried out.[^10] + +### The Robert Maxwell Legacy + +Robert Maxwell (born Jan Ludvik Hoch, 1923, in [[Czechoslovakia|Czechoslovakia]]) was the British publishing mogul who controlled [[Mirror Group Newspapers|Mirror Group Newspapers]] and [[Pergamon Press|Pergamon Press]], served as a [[Member of Parliament|Member of Parliament]], and died on November 5, 1991, in a documented drowning at sea off his yacht *Lady Ghislaine* (named for his daughter) near the [[Canary Islands|Canary Islands]]. After his death, his empire was found to have looted approximately 460 million pounds from the Mirror Group pension fund.[^2][^3] + +Robert Maxwell was accused across multiple documented sources of operating as an intelligence asset for Mossad, [[MI6|MI6]], and the [[KGB|KGB]]. The documented allegations include the distribution of modified [[PROMIS|PROMIS]] software to facilitate Israeli intelligence-gathering operations, involvement in the [[Mordechai Vanunu|Vanunu]] case, and the broader intelligence-community relationships documented by the journalists [[Gordon Thomas|Gordon Thomas]] (in *[[Gideon's Spies|Gideon's Spies]]*) and the BBC Select documentary "Robert Maxwell, the KGB and MI6." Robert Maxwell met the accusations with denials and legal threats. No intelligence service has officially confirmed him as an agent.[^2][^3] + +### The Intelligence-Operation Question + +Ghislaine Maxwell moved to [[New York|New York]] in 1991 after her father's death and the collapse of the family's reputation, reportedly with a financial settlement from the family estate. She met Epstein shortly after. Her lawyers have argued that her father's death "set her on a path" toward Epstein. The documented combination of Robert Maxwell's intelligence legacy, Ghislaine's role as Epstein's social partner and the principal recruiter of the trafficking operation, the documented [[Ehud Barak|Israeli-intelligence]] contacts through Epstein, and the broader pattern of Epstein's relationships with intelligence officials ([[William Burns]]) and technology principals ([[Peter Thiel|Thiel]], [[Elon Musk|Musk]]) has produced the recurring analytical question of whether the Epstein-Maxwell operation functioned as an intelligence-linked compromise or "honeypot" operation. The question is not confirmed in any primary document and is flagged here as a documented analytical thread.[^3][^5] + +The strongest version of the intelligence claim traces to Ari Ben-Menashe, a self-described former Israeli Military Intelligence figure, who alleged in interviews and in his book *Profits of War* (1992) that Robert Maxwell was a "full-service" Mossad asset and that Epstein and Ghislaine were introduced into Israeli intelligence work through the Maxwell connection.[^8] Ben-Menashe's reliability is contested: his account is uncorroborated by any declassified file, he has made other claims that proved unverifiable, and no intelligence service has confirmed any of it, so the assertion that Ghislaine inherited her father's intelligence ties is reported allegation rather than established fact.[^8] What is documented in the trial record and contemporaneous reporting is narrower: that Maxwell maintained the social access (to figures including Prince Andrew and a transatlantic donor class) through which Epstein's operation functioned, and that Epstein separately cultivated relationships with Barak and others. Whether that access was directed by any service, or was simply the by-product of inherited wealth and connections weaponized for blackmail-adjacent leverage, remains unproven in any primary source.[^3][^5] + +### The 2025 Justice Department Interview and Transfer + +In late July 2025 the Deputy Attorney General [[Todd Blanche]], who had previously served as [[Donald Trump|Donald Trump's]] personal defense attorney, interviewed Maxwell over two days at the federal correctional institution in [[Tallahassee, Florida|Tallahassee]] under a grant of limited proffer immunity. The Justice Department released a 337-page transcript on August 22, 2025. In it Maxwell discussed Trump, Prince Andrew, and other prominent men associated with Epstein and largely spoke of them in exculpatory terms, while declining to confirm the central allegations against several figures. The interview was conducted while the Trump administration was managing the contested release of the Epstein files, and critics characterized it as an effort to shape the public record.[^11] + +Days after the interview, on August 1, 2025, Maxwell was moved from the Tallahassee facility to the minimum-security [[Federal Prison Camp Bryan]] in Texas. Former Bureau of Prisons officials called the transfer "highly unusual" for an inmate convicted of a sex offense with more than ten years left to serve, since prison camps ordinarily exclude both categories. Senator [[Sheldon Whitehouse]] demanded documents explaining the decision, and residents of Bryan protested her arrival. The Bureau of Prisons did not provide a detailed public rationale.[^11] + +Maxwell pursued parallel efforts to overturn or shorten her sentence. Her attorneys petitioned the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] to vacate the conviction, arguing that the co-conspirator immunity clause in Epstein's 2007 [[non-prosecution agreement]] with the Southern District of Florida barred her later prosecution anywhere in the country; the Court denied certiorari in October 2025. She separately offered to testify before the [[House Oversight Committee]], which had subpoenaed her, on the condition that she receive immunity, a condition that was not granted.[^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Ghislaine Maxwell Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison." *U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of New York,* June 28, 2022. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prison-conspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually-abuse +[^2]: "The murky life and death of Robert Maxwell, and how it shaped his daughter Ghislaine." *The Guardian,* August 22, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/22/the-murky-life-and-death-of-robert-maxwell-and-how-it-shaped-his-daughter-ghislaine +[^3]: Thomas, Gordon. *Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.* St. Martin's Press. +[^4]: "Ghislaine Maxwell loses sex trafficking appeal." *BBC,* September 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0glxd0gxko +[^5]: For the Epstein-Barak Israeli-intelligence channel and the Epstein-Burns CIA-director contacts, see the Jeffrey Epstein, Ehud Barak, and William Burns pages. +[^6]: "Ghislaine Maxwell trial: Jury finds she sex trafficked a minor for Jeffrey Epstein, guilty on five of six counts." *CNN,* December 29, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/29/us/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-wednesday +[^7]: United States v. Maxwell, 20 Cr. 330 (AJN), Opinion and Order denying motion for new trial (S.D.N.Y. April 1, 2022). See also "Juror's omissions will not trigger Ghislaine Maxwell retrial." *Courthouse News Service.* https://www.courthousenews.com/jurors-omissions-will-not-trigger-ghislaine-maxwell-retrial/ +[^8]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* Sheridan Square Press, 1992. Ben-Menashe's claims that Robert Maxwell was a Mossad asset and that the Maxwell-Epstein link served Israeli intelligence are uncorroborated by declassified material and treated as contested allegation; see also Thomas, *Gideon's Spies* (note 3). +[^9]: For Maxwell's family, education, and move to New York, see "Ghislaine Maxwell: The British socialite who became Epstein's confidante." *BBC,* December 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53100417 and the contemporaneous biographical reporting. +[^10]: For the recruitment mechanics, the contact directory, and the victim testimony, see the trial record in United States v. Maxwell, 20 Cr. 330 (S.D.N.Y. 2021), the January 2024 unsealing of Giuffre v. Maxwell exhibits before Judge Loretta Preska, and the Alfredo Rodriguez obstruction case (S.D. Fla.). +[^11]: "Justice Department releases transcripts from Ghislaine Maxwell's interview." *CNN,* August 22, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-doj-documents-08-22-25 ; "Ghislaine Maxwell moved to federal prison camp in Texas." *CNN,* August 1, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/01/politics/ghislaine-maxwell-federal-prison-texas ; "Supreme Court declines to hear Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal." *SCOTUSblog,* October 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-ghislaine-maxwells-appeal/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Holden Karnofsky.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Holden Karnofsky.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c34311ce --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Holden Karnofsky.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - EffectiveAltruism + - OpenPhilanthropy + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Longtermism +alias: + - Holden Karnofsky +summary: "Holden Karnofsky is the cofounder of the charity evaluator GiveWell and of Open Philanthropy, the largest sustained funder of effective altruism and AI-safety work, an early backer of Anthropic who later moved into AI-safety strategy and joined Anthropic in 2025, and the husband of Anthropic president Daniela Amodei." +born: 1981 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Holden Karnofsky (born 1981) is an American grantmaker who cofounded the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]] and the foundation [[Open Philanthropy]], the durable financial backbone of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and of [[Longtermism|longtermist]] and AI-safety work. As Open Philanthropy's co-chief executive he directed the institutional patronage that sustained AI-existential-risk research, was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], and in 2025 left grantmaking to work at Anthropic directly. He is married to Anthropic cofounder and president [[Daniela Amodei]].[^1][^2] + +### GiveWell + +Karnofsky and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] met as analysts at the hedge fund [[Bridgewater Associates]], where they were part of a group of eight finance-industry friends researching charitable giving in their spare time. In 2007 the two left their jobs, raised about 300,000 dollars from former coworkers, and founded GiveWell, an organization that rates charities by the measured cost-effectiveness of their interventions and recommends a short list of top picks. The model, evidence-based giving aimed at maximizing lives saved per dollar, became one of the two intellectual streams of effective altruism, alongside the Oxford moral philosophy of [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]].[^3][^4] + +Months after the launch, Karnofsky was caught promoting GiveWell anonymously: in December 2007 he posted a question soliciting charity recommendations on the community site Ask MetaFilter under a false identity, then answered it touting GiveWell without disclosing his role. The board removed him as executive director and board secretary effective January 3, 2008, cut 5,000 dollars from his salary, and required him to take a professional-development course; he was later restored to the leadership. GiveWell grew into a major channel for evidence-based giving, directing more than 1.45 billion dollars to its top charities between 2009 and 2024, with roughly half of that going to the [[Against Malaria Foundation]] at an estimated cost of about 5,500 dollars per life saved.[^7][^8] + +### Open Philanthropy + +GiveWell's research into larger and riskier giving opportunities led to a partnership with Good Ventures, the foundation established in 2011 by [[Facebook]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]]. The two efforts joined as the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014 and began independent operations in 2017, with Karnofsky as co-chief executive. Funded chiefly by Moskovitz and Tuna, Open Philanthropy directed more than four billion dollars in grants by 2025 across global health and "longtermism," the latter covering AI risk, pandemic preparedness, and the far future. Its AI-risk money flowed to the research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and the [[Rationalist Community]], making Open Philanthropy the principal patron of AI-safety work outside the technology companies. The organization renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.[^1][^2] + +The effort began inside GiveWell as "GiveWell Labs" before splitting off, with Karnofsky and [[Alexander Berger]] sharing the chief-executive role until Berger became sole chief executive on Karnofsky's 2023 departure. In March 2017 Karnofsky steered Open Philanthropy's 30-million-dollar grant to [[OpenAI]], a sum that bought a board seat he held until 2021, when he resigned it after his wife cofounded a competing lab. Between 2021 and 2023 Karnofsky wrote the "most important century" series on his blog Cold Takes, more than twenty essays arguing that the development of transformative AI could make the present century the most consequential in human history, a thesis that supplied the intellectual rationale for Open Philanthropy's concentration of money on AI risk.[^2][^9] + +### Anthropic and the Amodei Tie + +Open Philanthropy was an early funder of Anthropic, the AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu, and Karnofsky held a seat associated with that early backing. Karnofsky married Daniela Amodei in 2017; she cofounded Anthropic with her brother [[Dario Amodei]] and serves as its president. In 2022 [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] invested roughly 500 million dollars of [[FTX]]-derived capital in Anthropic through [[Alameda Research]], placing the company at the intersection of the movement's two largest funders during the period Karnofsky's foundation and his wife's company were both tied to it. Karnofsky took a leave from his co-chief-executive role in 2023 to focus on AI strategy and joined Anthropic in January 2025 to work on its responsible-scaling and safety policies.[^2][^5][^6] + +The overlap drew the criticism that the largest funder of independent AI-safety research was led by a man married to the president of a frontier AI lab his foundation had financed. Karnofsky's OpenAI board seat from 2017 to 2021 had already placed him inside one leading lab before the marriage tie connected him to a second; commentators noted that the same small network of effective-altruism figures sat on the funding, governance, and research sides of the field at once. At Anthropic he took up work on the company's Responsible Scaling Policy, the framework of capability thresholds and safety commitments the company uses to govern the release of more powerful models.[^2][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^2]: "Who Funds the AI Safety Watchdogs," Inside The Black Box, on Open Philanthropy's share of AI-safety funding, the Karnofsky-Amodei marriage, and Karnofsky's 2025 move to Anthropic. https://itbb.substack.com/p/who-funds-the-watchdogs +[^3]: "Our Story," GiveWell, on the 2007 founding by eight finance-industry friends and the 300,000-dollar startup raise. https://www.givewell.org/about/story +[^4]: "GiveWell Co-Founder Explains Effective Altruism Frameworks," *The Harvard Crimson,* December 4, 2015. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/12/4/givewell-founder-effective-altruism/ +[^5]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023, on the 500 million dollar Anthropic investment via Alameda Research. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/ +[^6]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder and the Karnofsky tie. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^7]: "GiveWell in turmoil after 'horrible lapse of judgement' by founders," *Alliance,* 2008, on the MetaFilter astroturfing and the board sanctions. https://www.alliancemagazine.org/news/givewell-in-turmoil-after-horrible-lapse-of-judgement-by-founders/ +[^8]: "GiveWell's Fundraising and Grantmaking in 2023" and "GiveWell's 2024 Metrics and Impact," The GiveWell Blog, on the cumulative 1.45-billion-dollar total and the Against Malaria Foundation cost per life saved. https://blog.givewell.org/2025/08/13/givewells-2024-metrics-and-impact/ +[^9]: "OpenAI General Support," Good Ventures, on the March 2017 30-million-dollar grant and Karnofsky's board seat through 2021; Karnofsky, Holden, "The Most Important Century," Cold Takes, 2021. https://www.cold-takes.com/the-most-important-century-in-a-nutshell/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Igor Kurganov.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Igor Kurganov.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7c41d91b --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Igor Kurganov.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - IgorKurganov + - ElonMusk + - Russia + - FBI + - ForeignInterference + - Philanthropy + - Counterintelligence +alias: + - Igor Kurganov +summary: "Igor Kurganov is a Russian-born former professional poker player who gained operational influence over Elon Musk's charitable giving during the COVID-19 pandemic, slept in Musk's Austin home, and was the subject of FBI preliminary inquiries into foreign interference before being removed from Musk's inner circle by wealth manager Jared Birchall in May 2022." +location: "Russia (born); Austin, Texas (Musk period)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Igor Kurganov is a Russian-born former professional poker player who gained operational influence over [[Elon Musk|Elon Musk]]'s charitable giving during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kurganov was sleeping in Musk's [[Austin, Texas|Austin]] home during the pandemic period, advising Musk on philanthropic strategy, and became the subject of FBI preliminary inquiries into whether his access constituted a foreign-interference channel. [[Jared Birchall|Jared Birchall]], Musk's wealth manager and the head of Musk's family office, confronted Musk and removed Kurganov from the inner circle in May 2022.[^1] + +### The Poker Career and the Musk Access + +Kurganov built a public profile as a high-stakes professional poker player, accumulating over 18 million dollars in live tournament winnings across a career that placed him among the top German and Russian tournament players. His poker network overlaps with the high-roller gambling circuit whose principals move across national borders and whose venues (Macau, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, the online high-stakes sites) are documented intelligence-collection environments.[^1][^2] + +The documented path to Musk ran through Kurganov's effective-altruism and philanthropic-strategy work. Kurganov entered Musk's circle during the pandemic period and gained influence over Musk's charitable giving, which had become a substantial operation as Musk's wealth grew through the [[Tesla|Tesla]] stock run-up and the [[SpaceX|SpaceX]] private valuations. Kurganov's access included sleeping in Musk's Austin home, placing him inside Musk's residential security perimeter rather than at arm's length as a professional advisor.[^1] + +### The FBI Preliminary Inquiry + +The FBI's Los Angeles field office opened preliminary inquiries into whether Kurganov's access to Musk constituted a foreign-interference channel, per *The Guardian*'s reporting on the disclosures of former FBI agent [[Jonathan Buma]]. The inquiry ran under the counterintelligence portfolio that handles Russian foreign-influence operations targeting U.S. technology principals. Buma described the broader pattern of Russian targeting of Musk as "intense," and the [[Kyiv Post|Kyiv Post]] / [[ZDF|ZDF]] reporting on Buma's interview characterized the operation as [[GRU|GRU]]-run and Putin-approved, exploiting vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access.[^1][^3] + +The question of what Kurganov did with the access during the period he had it (advising on philanthropic strategy, residential access, proximity to Musk's decision-making on charitable and potentially other matters) is not fully resolved in the public record. The FBI inquiry was preliminary, meaning it was an assessment-stage investigation to determine whether full counterintelligence investigation was warranted.[^1] + +### The Birchall Removal (May 2022) + +Jared Birchall is the wealth manager who runs Musk's family office and who functions as Musk's gatekeeper on financial and security matters. *The Guardian* reported that Birchall confronted Musk about Kurganov's access and removed Kurganov from the inner circle in May 2022.[^1] + +What Kurganov did with his access during the period he had it, what he took with him when he was removed, and whether the access produced intelligence value for any Russian service are not documented in the public record.[^1] + +### The Broader Targeting Pattern + +Buma disclosed that the Kurganov case was one of multiple Russian targeting efforts directed at Musk and at [[Peter Thiel|Thiel]]. The [[The Guardian|Guardian]] reported Buma's May 2025 interview in which he characterized the efforts as "intense," and the Kyiv Post reporting on Buma's ZDF interview described the operation as GRU-run, Putin-approved, and exploiting vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access.[^1][^4] + +The Buma handling of Thiel as an FBI CHS from summer 2021 overlaps chronologically with the Kurganov-Musk access period (2020-2022). Buma told the Guardian he briefed Thiel on "what a targeting looks like" and that Thiel provided "helpful information to help us identify the nodes through which these outreaches have occurred." The overlap means the FBI's counterintelligence handling of the Thiel CHS relationship and the FBI's preliminary inquiry into Kurganov's access to Musk ran in the same Los Angeles field office during the same period.[^1][^4] + +The [[Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] reported on October 25, 2024 that Musk had been in regular contact with [[Vladimir Putin|Putin]] since late 2022, after [[Starlink|Starlink]] became operationally significant in the Russia-Ukraine war. The Putin contact channel, the Buma-documented GRU targeting, the Kurganov infiltration, and the [[NLRB Data Exfiltration|NLRB data exfiltration]] with Russian IP access through [[Department of Government Efficiency|DOGE]] together form the evidentiary set on the Russian-influence question around the PayPal Mafia principals.[^1][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia +[^2]: For Kurganov's poker career earnings and ranking, see the [[Hendon Mob|Hendon Mob]] poker database and the live-tournament record. +[^3]: "Russian Intelligence Used Sex, Drugs to Target Elon Musk." *Kyiv Post,* 2025. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/52742 +[^4]: Schwartz, Mattathias. "Exclusive: Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was an FBI informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023, on Thiel providing information to FBI agent Johnathan Buma as a confidential human source codenamed "Philosopher" beginning summer 2021, focused on foreign-influence approaches. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-2023-10 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jack LaSota.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jack LaSota.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..55235b05 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jack LaSota.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Extremism & Violent Networks" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Rationalism + - Cult + - Violence + - ArtificialIntelligence +alias: + - Ziz + - Jack Amadeus LaSota +summary: "Jack LaSota, who writes under the persona 'Ziz,' is an Alaska-born computer programmer and former rationalist who founded the group known as the Zizians around a theory of brain hemispheres and militant veganism, and who was arrested in Maryland in February 2025 as the group was tied to six deaths across three states." +born: 1990 +location: "Fairbanks, Alaska" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Jack LaSota, who writes under the online persona "Ziz," is an American computer programmer and former member of the Bay Area [[Rationalist Community]] who founded the small group known as the [[The Zizians|Zizians]]. Born and raised in [[Fairbanks]], [[Alaska]], LaSota built a doctrine combining an original theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, anarchism, and rationalist decision theory, and gathered a circle of mostly young transgender followers around it. Between 2022 and 2025 the group was tied to six deaths across [[California]], [[Pennsylvania]], and [[Vermont]]. LaSota was arrested in [[Maryland]] in February 2025 and faces federal and state charges.[^1][^2] + +### Background + +LaSota studied computer science at the [[University of Alaska Fairbanks]], briefly pursued postgraduate work at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]], and interned at [[NASA]] before moving to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] around 2013. An avid reader of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], she sought out the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI) and the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR), entering the rationalist scene as an enthusiast before becoming one of its harshest critics, accusing both organizations of "ethical hypocrisy" for failing to act on the moral demands of their own doctrine.[^2][^3] + +She began posting around 2016 under the persona "Ziz," debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on [[LessWrong]] before moving to a personal blog with longer essays on technology, gender, and cognition. LaSota did not hold steady employment in the Bay Area and lived on the community's margins. CFAR co-founder [[Anna Salamon]] later described her as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a scene dense with technical talent, an account that places the turn toward an esoteric doctrine in a competition for status the broader rationalist world did not grant her. The formal break came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected her hemisphere theory.[^9][^10] + +### The Zizian Doctrine + +LaSota's blog advanced the theory that the brain's two hemispheres hold separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, and she sorted people's mental "cores" as "nongood," "single good," or "double good." She counted herself among a very small number of "double good" people. The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," a sleep-deprivation method she said could "jailbreak" the mind, and "debucketing," the unlearning of social categories. She wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in [[Star Wars]], framing an adversarial morality against a world she held to be complicit in animal killing and facing collapse from artificial-intelligence misalignment. A follower, [[Maia Pasek]], died by suicide in February 2018; LaSota presented the death as evidence of her method's power.[^1][^4] + +The doctrine borrowed "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction, the idea that an agent is accountable for an outcome regardless of whether anyone else failed first, and fused it with the timeless-decision-theory claim that one should act on universal principles rather than case-by-case pragmatism. In LaSota's hands these combined to recast ordinary moral compromise as existential betrayal, so that declining to confront a perceived wrong became itself a culpable act. She also argued that transgender women possessed a distinct cognitive profile suited to AI-safety work, a claim that helped concentrate recruitment among young transgender rationalists. The hemisphere framework had operational consequences: a member rated only "single good," such as the associate [[Gwen Danielson]], was treated as untrustworthy and subject to watching, which built suspicion and ranking into the group's internal life.[^1][^3] + +### The CFAR Break and the Faked Death + +In November 2019 LaSota and several associates protested a CFAR retreat at [[Occidental]] in [[Sonoma County]] in masks and robes; four were arrested, and CFAR barred LaSota from its events. In August 2022 she staged her own death, leaving the impression she had drowned after going off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in [[Philadelphia]] in 2023.[^2][^5] + +The 2022 vanishing followed a recoverable sequence: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that she had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was found, and an obituary appeared, which let her exit pending [[Vallejo]] proceedings as a presumed drowning. Before staging that death she had already accumulated criminal exposure beyond the Sonoma standoff. In early 2023, in connection with the killing of [[Michelle Zajko]]'s parents in Pennsylvania, LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct, charges that ran alongside the firearms case that would later put her in federal custody.[^5][^9] + +### Arrest and Prosecution + +On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested in Allegany County, Maryland, alongside Michelle Zajko and [[Daniel Blank]] after a property owner near [[Frostburg]] reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators reported finding a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted her on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years; she pleaded not guilty.[^6][^7] + +On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation requested by defense attorney Gary Proctor, who reported that LaSota had refused to meet a doctor brought to the jail and had told an earlier hearing that the judge ran an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." Her lawyers rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in their filings and accused the Department of Justice of misgendering her by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center awaiting state and federal proceedings, which prosecutors moved to consolidate so that members of the group would face trial together in Maryland.[^8][^11][^12] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/ +[^2]: "Zizians," World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, November 7, 2025. https://wrldrels.org/2025/11/07/zizians/ +[^3]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309 +[^4]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/ +[^5]: "'Zizian' namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states," *Open Vallejo,* January 31, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/ +[^6]: U.S. Department of Justice, District of Maryland, "Alaskan Individual Charged with Possessing Firearms and Ammunition as a Fugitive from Justice," June 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/alaskan-individual-charged-possessing-firearms-and-ammunition-fugitive-justice +[^7]: "Leader of cult-like group linked to killing border agent in Vermont faces federal charges," *The Boston Globe,* June 21, 2025. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/21/metro/jack-lasota-zizian-leader-indicted-in-maryland/ +[^8]: "Judge orders competency evaluation for alleged 'Zizian' cult leader Ziz LaSota," *The Baltimore Banner,* March 12, 2026; on the competency order, attorney Gary Proctor's account, and the "Timeless" remark. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizian-cult-leader-competency-evaluation-PXYELJW3NBB5HOUWG6MA4U4E3I/ +[^9]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the 2016 "Ziz" blog, the 2018 split, the Coast Guard report, and the 2023 obstruction charge. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^10]: "Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley," Ian Leslie, 2025, on Anna Salamon's account of LaSota wanting to "feel special." https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley +[^11]: "Federal authorities bring firearms charge against alleged leader of Zizians," *VTDigger,* June 20, 2025, on the indictment and the Frostburg arrest. https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/20/federal-authorities-bring-firearms-charge-against-alleged-leader-of-zizians/ +[^12]: "Members of violent Zizian cult to face trial together in Maryland," *The Baltimore Banner,* 2026. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizians-cult-members-trial-maryland-K35MFJBNPRH4VNMBZGT2J5OT34/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jared Kushner.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jared Kushner.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b01a2ad8 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jared Kushner.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - JaredKushner + - Trump + - SaudiArabia + - MBS + - AffinityPartners + - AbrahamAccords + - NSOGroup + - Khashoggi +alias: + - Jared Corey Kushner +summary: "Jared Kushner is an American investor and former senior advisor to President Donald Trump who shaped Middle East policy through the Abraham Accords and U.S.-Saudi arms sales, maintained a WhatsApp channel with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the CIA assessed as compromised, and received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for his private equity firm months after leaving government despite the fund's own due-diligence panel rejecting the deal." +born: 1981-01-10 +location: "Livingston, New Jersey (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Jared Kushner (born January 10, 1981, in [[Livingston, New Jersey|Livingston]], [[New Jersey]]) is an American investor who served as senior advisor to President [[Donald Trump]] from January 2017 to January 2021, with a portfolio that included Middle East policy, criminal justice reform, and the federal pandemic response. Kushner shaped the [[Abraham Accords|Abraham Accords]] (the 2020 normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco), U.S.-Saudi arms sales, and the broader regional realignment that the Trump administration pursued. After leaving government, Kushner founded the private equity firm [[Affinity Partners|Affinity Partners]], which received a 2 billion dollar commitment from the [[Public Investment Fund|Saudi Public Investment Fund]] (chaired by Crown Prince [[Mohammed bin Salman|Mohammed bin Salman]]) despite the fund's own due-diligence panel recommending against the investment. Kushner maintained a documented [[WhatsApp|WhatsApp]] communication channel with MBS during his government service, a channel the CIA assessed as compromised.[^1][^2][^3][^4] + +### The White House Middle East Portfolio + +Kushner's White House portfolio covered the Middle East policy that produced the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-[[Saudi Arabia|Saudi Arabia]] relationship, and the administration's approach to the [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict|Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]. The Abraham Accords normalized relations between [[Israel|Israel]] and the [[United Arab Emirates|UAE]], [[Bahrain|Bahrain]], [[Sudan|Sudan]], and [[Morocco|Morocco]] in 2020, breaking with the prior U.S. framework that had conditioned normalization on Israeli-Palestinian progress. Kushner led the negotiation, which ran alongside the administration's approval of major arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE despite congressional opposition.[^1][^2] + +The Saudi relationship was the central element. [[The Intercept|The Intercept]] reported that MBS boasted Kushner was "in his pocket," and that Kushner had grown close to the Saudi and Emirati crown princes through direct personal communication. Kushner's handling of the Saudi portfolio included the administration's response to the [[Jamal Khashoggi|October 2018 Khashoggi murder]], in which MBS was assessed by the CIA to have ordered the assassination. Kushner maintained his relationship with MBS after the murder.[^3][^4] + +### The WhatsApp Channel and the Bezos Hack + +Kushner used WhatsApp to communicate directly with MBS during his government service, [[ABC News|ABC News]] reported. The channel bypassed the official State Department and NSC communication systems and raised documented national-security concerns. In January 2020, [[The Guardian|The Guardian]] reported that [[Jeff Bezos|Jeff Bezos]]'s phone was hacked in May 2018 through a malicious file sent from MBS's personal WhatsApp account. The UN's [[Agnès Callamard|Agnès Callamard]] subsequently advised Kushner to replace his phone, warning that anyone in regular contact with MBS via WhatsApp could be a surveillance target.[^4][^5][^6] + +The WhatsApp channel that MBS used to communicate with Kushner was the same channel used to compromise Bezos. Whether Kushner's own device was compromised through the channel is not confirmed in the public record. The CIA assessed with high confidence that MBS was in regular contact with Kushner via private channels.[^4][^5] + +### The Khashoggi Surveillance + +[[NSO Group|NSO Group]]'s [[Pegasus (spyware)|Pegasus]] spyware was deployed against associates of Jamal Khashoggi before the October 2018 murder inside the Saudi consulate in [[Istanbul|Istanbul]]. The Guardian reported in July 2021, based on the [[Pegasus Project|Pegasus Project]] leak, that Pegasus was found on the phone of Khashoggi's wife [[Hanan Elatr|Hanan Elatr]] months before the killing. An Emirati government agency separately placed NSO spyware on the phone of a Khashoggi associate, [[Al Jazeera|Al Jazeera]] reported. Khashoggi's friend [[Omar Abdul Aziz|Omar Abdul Aziz]] sued NSO Group, claiming its spyware enabled the killing.[^7] + +The NSO Group-Khashoggi surveillance, the MBS WhatsApp channel, and the Kushner-MBS relationship together form the documented chain through which the Saudi surveillance apparatus operated against Khashoggi and his network while MBS maintained his private communication channel with the senior U.S. advisor handling Saudi policy.[^4][^7] + +### Affinity Partners and the Middle East Sovereign Wealth + +Affinity Partners was founded by Kushner in 2021 after leaving government. Within months, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), chaired by MBS, committed 2 billion dollars to the fund. The [[Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] reported that the PIF's own due-diligence panel recommended against the investment, citing Kushner's lack of private-equity experience and characterizing the pitch as "unsatisfactory in all aspects." MBS overruled the panel and approved the commitment.[^1][^2] + +The UAE and [[Qatar|Qatar]] subsequently invested at least 1.5 billion dollars combined, per [[Mother Jones|Mother Jones]]. By early 2024, Affinity managed approximately 3 billion dollars in foreign-sourced capital. [[Bloomberg|Bloomberg]] reported in May 2026 that the fund had grown to approximately 6 billion dollars under management, nearly all of it from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth. The Wall Street Journal documented that Kushner's fund planned to invest Saudi money into Israeli startups, leveraging the normalization momentum from the Abraham Accords.[^1][^8][^10] + +[[Senator Ron Wyden|Senator Ron Wyden]] (Senate Finance Committee chairman) and Representative [[Robert Garcia|Robert Garcia]] opened a congressional investigation into Affinity Partners. The investigation documented the firm's fee structure (approximately 157 million dollars in fees collected), the lack of returns to investors, and what the committee characterized as questionable deals with foreign governments. Bloomberg reported on Kushner's documented "dual role" as both a 6-billion-dollar fund manager and a Middle East peace envoy, with the same governments that back his fund being the parties he engages diplomatically. A Qatar-backed investment fund was also tied to a 1-billion-dollar rental deal that helped resolve Kushner family financial issues.[^8][^9][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Jared Kushner defends controversial $2bn Saudi investment." *BBC,* 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68296877 +[^2]: "Jared Kushner's New Fund Plans to Invest Saudi Money in Israel." *Wall Street Journal,* 2022. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/jared-kushners-new-fund-plans-to-invest-saudi-money-in-israel-11651927236 +[^3]: "They Went to Jared." *Mother Jones,* June 2026. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/jared-kushner-affinity-partners-fund-saudi-arabia-qatar-uae-israel-middle-east-deals-nepotism/ +[^4]: "Jared Kushner, Mohammed bin Salman, and the Making of the Trump-Saudi Alliance." *The Intercept,* March 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/21/jared-kushner-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman/ +[^5]: "Amazon boss Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince.'" *The Guardian,* January 21, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/21/amazon-boss-jeff-bezoss-phone-hacked-by-saudi-crown-prince +[^6]: "Jared Kushner used WhatsApp to message foreign contacts in White House." *ABC News.* https://abcnews.com/Politics/jared-kushner-whatsapp-foreign-contacts-lawyer-tells-congress/story?id=61843329 +[^7]: "NSO spyware used to target family of Jamal Khashoggi, leaked data shows." *The Guardian,* July 18, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus +[^8]: Wyden investigation of Affinity Partners, *U.S. Senate Finance Committee.* https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-investigation-of-kushner-firm-continues-new-letter-outlines-affinity-partners-fee-structure-lack-of-return-to-investors-questionable-deals-with-foreign-governments +[^9]: "Jared Kushner Solicits Funds for His Firm While Working as Mideast Advisor." *New York Times,* March 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/jared-kushner-affinity-mideast-funds.html +[^10]: "Kushner Disappoints Mideast Clients." *Bloomberg,* May 14, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-05-14/jared-kushner-s-dual-role-trump-peace-envoy-and-6-billion-fund-manager ; Garcia and Wyden letter to Affinity Partners, House Oversight Democrats, March 2026. https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/download/2026-03-19garcia-wyden-letter-to-affinity-partners-re-kushner-fundraising diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jim Himes.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jim Himes.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8e6ba75d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jim Himes.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - JimHimes + - DemocraticParty + - Connecticut + - Congress + - HouseIntelligenceCommittee + - GoldmanSachs + - Dialog +alias: + - James Andres Himes + - James Himes + - Representative Jim Himes +summary: "Jim Himes is a U.S. Representative for Connecticut's 4th district and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence whose name appeared on the leaked 2026 registration roster of Peter Thiel's secretive Dialog society." +born: 1966-07-05 +location: "Lima, Peru (born); Greenwich, Connecticut (political base)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jim Himes (born July 5, 1966, in [[Lima]], [[Peru]]) is an American politician and former investment banker who has represented Connecticut's 4th congressional district in the [[United States House of Representatives]] since 2009 and who serves as ranking member of the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]]. In June 2026 Himes was named by *WIRED* among the registrants surfaced in the leak of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]], where Himes appeared on the same roster as [[Palantir Technologies]] cofounder [[Joe Lonsdale]], whose firm contracts with the intelligence agencies Himes oversees.[^1][^2] + +### Early Life, Goldman Sachs, and Entry to Congress + +Himes was born in Lima, where his American father worked for the [[Ford Foundation]] and [[UNICEF]]; he spent his early childhood in Peru and [[Colombia]] before the family settled in the United States. He attended [[Harvard University]] and won a [[Rhodes Scholarship]] to [[Oxford University]], where he studied Latin America. He then joined [[Goldman Sachs]], spending roughly twelve years at the bank and rising to vice president, working extensively in Latin America and heading the bank's telecommunications-technology group. After leaving Goldman he ran the New York City branch of the affordable-housing nonprofit [[Enterprise Community Partners]].[^3] + +Himes was first elected to Congress in November 2008, unseating the long-serving Republican incumbent [[Christopher Shays]] in the [[Connecticut]] 4th, a wealthy district anchored by [[Greenwich]] and the Fairfield County financial-services corridor. He took office in January 2009 and has been reelected to successive terms, serving on the [[House Financial Services Committee]] alongside his intelligence assignment. Within the [[Democratic Party]] he has been associated with the centrist, finance-friendly [[New Democrat Coalition]], which he chaired.[^3] + +### Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee + +Himes sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the panel charged with congressional oversight of the U.S. [[Intelligence Community]], including the [[Central Intelligence Agency]], the [[National Security Agency]], and the [[Office of the Director of National Intelligence]]. He became the committee's ranking member, the senior Democrat, giving him access to classified briefings and a formal role in authorizing and reviewing the budgets and operations of the agencies under the committee's jurisdiction.[^2][^3] + +The committee's oversight reach includes federal agencies that contract with Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics firm chaired by Thiel, whose software has been used by [[U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]] and the [[Department of Defense]]. *WIRED* framed the Dialog roster around exactly this overlap: a sitting member with intelligence oversight authority appearing on an off-the-record membership list beside the cofounder of a company whose principal customers are the agencies that member oversees.[^1][^2] + +### The 2026 Dialog Leak + +The June 16, 2026 *WIRED* report identified Himes on the Dialog roster as "Rep., CT; House Intelligence," placing him among a group of sitting U.S. officials surfaced when the Swiss hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] located a member directory embedded in the source code of Dialog's website and a separate source provided the publication with the 222-name registration list for the society's 2026 retreat, scheduled for August 12 through 16 at the Powerscourt Hotel near [[Dublin]]. *WIRED* noted Himes appeared on the list alongside Lonsdale and Army Secretary [[Dan Driscoll]].[^1] + +A representative for Himes responded to the reporting by stating: "Congressman Himes attended one annual conference held by the Dialog group roughly a decade ago. Since then, he has had no affiliation with the group and attended no additional events." The statement placed his single documented attendance around 2016 and disputed any continuing membership, while not contesting that his name was present in the leaked records.[^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "CT's Jim Himes responds to leaked Peter Thiel network records." *WSHU Public Radio,* June 18, 2026. https://www.wshu.org/connecticut-news/2026-06-18/ct-jim-himes-peter-thiel-network +[^3]: "About Jim." Office of Congressman Jim Himes, U.S. House of Representatives. https://himes.house.gov/about-jim ; "Committee and Caucuses." https://himes.house.gov/committee-assignments +[^4]: Statement of a representative for Representative Jim Himes, quoted in WSHU Public Radio, June 18, 2026, and in *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joe Lonsdale.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joe Lonsdale.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f4a884bd --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joe Lonsdale.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - JoeLonsdale + - Palantir + - FoundersFund + - 8VC + - Anduril + - PayPalMafia + - DefenseContractor +alias: + - Joseph Lonsdale +summary: "Joe Lonsdale is an American technology entrepreneur and investor who cofounded Palantir Technologies as a founding engineer in 2003, founded the venture capital firm 8VC, and has been a central figure in the Thiel-aligned defense-technology investment cluster backing Anduril Industries." +born: 1984-09-12 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Joe Lonsdale is an American technology entrepreneur and investor who cofounded [[Palantir Technologies]] as a founding engineer in 2003 and went on to found the venture capital firm [[8VC]]. He is a central figure in the Thiel-aligned defense-technology investment cluster that backs [[Anduril Industries]] and a constellation of adjacent firms, and his career is the second-generation instantiation of the [[Peter Thiel]] commercial model: a Palantir alumnus who applies the data-and-defense thesis across a portfolio of his own companies. Lonsdale is a member of the broader [[PayPal Mafia]] orbit by association with Thiel rather than by PayPal employment.[^1][^2] + +The Thiel network reproduces through founders who pass through it and then build adjacent firms. The PayPal Mafia generation built firms individually; the Palantir-alumnus generation, of which Lonsdale is the most prominent, built firms as a coordinated cluster around a shared investment thesis and a shared set of defense and intelligence clients. The cluster is held together by recurring capital relationships (8VC, Founders Fund), shared board seats, and, since 2006, by the off-the-record convening of [[Dialog]]. + +### Palantir Founding + +Lonsdale joined Thiel's [[Clarium Capital]] as an intern while an undergraduate at [[Stanford University]] and moved with the founding team to Palantir in 2003, where he was a founding engineer. Palantir, built on the data-integration architecture Thiel and [[Max Levchin]] had developed for fraud detection at [[PayPal]], received early funding from the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] venture arm [[In-Q-Tel]] and built its government platform Gotham around the post-[[September 11 attacks|9/11]] intelligence-fusion requirement. Lonsdale's role at Palantir placed him inside the technical core of the firm during its formative government-contracting years.[^2] + +The Stanford connection is the structural antecedent. Lonsdale was part of the Stanford computer-science and Thiel-adjacent undergraduate network that produced a disproportionate share of the Palantir founding team and its early engineering cohort. The Stanford-to-Palantir-to-founders pipeline became one of the reliable recruiting channels of the Thiel network, and Lonsdale's later founding and investing activity continued to draw on the same pool. The network is institutionally dense (shared university, shared first employer, shared venture backers, shared off-the-record convening).[^2] + +### Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC + +After Palantir, Lonsdale founded [[Addepar]], a wealth-management data platform serving ultra-high-net-worth investors and family offices, and [[OpenGov]], a cloud platform for local and state government financial management. Both companies apply the Palantir data-integration architecture to adjacent verticals: Addepar to the financial data of the wealthy, OpenGov to the financial data of sub-federal governments. The through-line is the privatization of the data substrate that an institution runs on, whether that institution is an intelligence agency, a family office, or a city government.[^1] + +Lonsdale founded the venture capital firm 8VC (originally Formation 8) to institutionalize the investment thesis across the cluster. The 8VC portfolio is concentrated in defense technology, health technology, and enterprise data infrastructure, and the firm is a recurring co-investor with [[Founders Fund]] in the Thiel-aligned deals. The defense-tech concentration, in particular, places 8VC as the venture arm of the Anduril Industries-led effort to rebuild Pentagon procurement around commercial software and hardware vendors rather than the traditional prime contractors.[^1] + +### Anduril and the Defense-Tech Cluster + +8VC and Lonsdale are early and continuing backers of Anduril Industries, the defense contractor founded by [[Palmer Luckey]] with Founders Fund backing, which builds autonomous systems, surveillance platforms, and battlefield software for the Department of Defense and allied militaries. Anduril's rapid scaling during the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration was the visible success case for the Thiel-network argument that the Pentagon should procure from Silicon Valley-style software firms rather than from the traditional defense primes ([[Lockheed Martin]], [[Raytheon]], [[Northrop Grumman]]).[^1] + +Through Anduril, Lonsdale, Thiel, and Luckey sit across the commercial firms (Anduril, Palantir, 8VC portfolio companies), the off-the-record convening (Dialog), and the government clients (the Pentagon and intelligence-agency principals who attend Dialog). The 2026 Dialog roster's inclusion of sitting military command and congressional oversight figures is where the defense-tech cluster's access to its government client base is mediated.[^3] + +### Political Activity + +Lonsdale has been politically active in the Thiel-aligned libertarian-to-Republican orbit. His political spending favors candidates who support higher Pentagon procurement from commercial software firms, lighter regulation of consumer-data brokerage, and the broader privatization-of-state-capacity frame that runs through the Thiel network.[^1] + +Lonsdale's documented political vehicles include contributions to Republican candidates and committees aligned with the defense-tech and limited-government thesis. He has been a recurring donor to Palantir alumni political efforts and to the candidates whose platforms support the 8VC portfolio thesis (defense-tech procurement, autonomous-systems funding, AI-and-surveillance infrastructure expansion). The 8VC portfolio includes Anduril, [[Clearview AI|Clearview]]-adjacent firms, and the broader defense-and-sovereign-infrastructure cluster whose commercial success depends on the federal procurement posture that the political spending supports.[^1] + +Lonsdale has also been involved in the institutional-placement dimension of the network. He sits on the board of the [[National Republican Congressional Committee|NRCC]]'s Wall Street board, and his political-network activity runs alongside the Founders Fund commercial relationship and the Dialog convening participation that place him in the same off-the-record rooms as the government principals whose procurement decisions affect his portfolio. The combination of venture-capital control (8VC), defense-contracting exposure (Anduril, Palantir adjacency), and political spending (defense-tech-aligned candidates) applies the privatization-of-state-capacity thesis across the political, commercial, and convening layers.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: 8VC, "Our Team: Joe Lonsdale," documenting the founding of 8VC (from Formation 8), Addepar, and OpenGov, and the firm's defense and enterprise-data portfolio. https://8vc.com/team/joe-lonsdale +[^2]: "Joe Lonsdale: From Palantir to Billionaire Investor?" *CEO Today,* August 2025, on Lonsdale co-founding Palantir Technologies with Thiel in 2004 and his role before departing in 2009. https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2025/08/how-joe-lonsdale-built-a-billion-dollar-tech-empire/ +[^3]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joi Ito.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joi Ito.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5c1606ca --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Joi Ito.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - JoiIto + - MITMediaLab + - JeffreyEpstein + - ReidHoffman + - PeterThiel + - ImageRehabilitation + - 2015Dinner +alias: + - Joichi Ito +summary: "Joi Ito is a Japanese-American venture capitalist and former director of the MIT Media Lab who resigned in September 2019 after Ronan Farrow's New Yorker reporting documented that the Media Lab had a deeper financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than previously disclosed, and who attended the 2015 Epstein dinner alongside Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg." +born: 1966-06-19 +location: "Kyoto, Japan (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Joi Ito (born Joichi Ito, June 19, 1966, in [[Kyoto]], [[Japan]]) is a Japanese-American venture capitalist and technology advocate who served as director of the [[MIT Media Lab|MIT Media Lab]] from 2011 until his September 2019 resignation. [[Ronan Farrow]]'s *[[The New Yorker|New Yorker]]* reporting (September 2019) documented that the Media Lab had a deeper financial relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] than previously disclosed, including Epstein-directed donations that Ito had personally solicited and attempted to conceal. Ito attended the 2015 Epstein dinner (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) alongside [[Peter Thiel]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Reid Hoffman]], and [[Mark Zuckerberg]]. Hoffman participated in the Epstein image-rehabilitation effort through Ito's introductions.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The MIT Media Lab and the Epstein Funding + +Ito became director of the MIT Media Lab in 2011. The Media Lab is the interdisciplinary research laboratory at [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] known for its experimental work at the intersection of technology, media, and design. Ito's tenure was characterized by aggressive fundraising from technology-industry donors and by the expansion of the Lab's corporate-sponsorship model. The Epstein funding was part of this expansion: Epstein directed donations to the Media Lab through a structure designed to conceal the source, and Ito personally solicited additional Epstein-directed funds.[^1][^2] + +Farrow's *New Yorker* piece (September 6, 2019), titled "How an Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein," documented that the Media Lab's relationship with Epstein was more extensive than MIT had publicly acknowledged, that Ito had accepted Epstein-directed donations after the 2008 conviction, and that the Lab had taken steps to keep the relationship from becoming public. The reporting was based on internal Media Lab documents obtained by *The New Yorker.* Ito resigned the same week.[^1] + +### The Image-Rehabilitation Channel and the Hoffman Connection + +The Ito-Epstein channel functioned as the conduit through which Reid Hoffman participated in the post-conviction Epstein image-rehabilitation effort. [[Axios|Axios]] reported in September 2019 that Hoffman apologized for his role in helping repair Epstein's public image, specifically for introductions Hoffman facilitated related to Epstein's MIT donations through Ito. The effort included an August 2015 dinner that Hoffman hosted in [[Palo Alto]] (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564), ostensibly to raise money for the Media Lab, whose guest list included Ito, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Epstein. Epstein described the gathering in an August 20, 2015 email to [[Tom Pritzker]], writing "i had dinner with zuckerburg, mu=k, thiel hoffman, wild."[^2][^3][^4] + +Epstein's donations to the Media Lab were directed through intermediaries and through structures designed to obscure the source. *The New Yorker* reporting documented that Ito had personally solicited additional Epstein-directed funds after the 2008 conviction and that the Lab had marked Epstein's contributions in its internal records with designations intended to keep the relationship from becoming public. The internal Media Lab documents obtained by *The New Yorker* included emails in which Ito and other Media Lab staff discussed how to process Epstein-directed funds without triggering disclosure requirements.[^1][^5] + +### The Resignation and the Aftermath + +Ito resigned from the MIT Media Lab on September 7, 2019, one day after the *New Yorker* reporting. MIT initiated an independent investigation conducted by the law firm [[Goodwin Procter|Goodwin Procter]], which produced a report documenting the extent of the Media Lab's Epstein relationship and the institutional failures that permitted it. The Goodwin Procter investigation found that MIT had accepted approximately 850,000 dollars in Epstein-directed or Epstein-connected donations across the 2012-2017 period, and that senior MIT officials, including the institute's president, had been aware of Epstein's involvement in directing funds.[^1][^5] + +Ito also resigned from positions at the [[John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation|MacArthur Foundation]], the [[John S. and James L. Knight Foundation|Knight Foundation]], the [[Knight-Hennessy Scholars|Knight-Hennessy Scholars]] program, and the [[New York Times Company|New York Times Company]] board. The resignations terminated Ito's positions across the philanthropic, media, and academic institutions that his Epstein relationship had damaged. The MIT Media Lab subsequently reformed its donor-acceptance policies to prohibit anonymous donations and to require enhanced due diligence on donors with criminal records.[^1][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Farrow, Ronan. "How an Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein." *The New Yorker,* September 6, 2019. +[^2]: "Mark Zuckerberg's 'Wild' Dinner With Epstein Revealed in Files." *The Daily Beast,* 2026, documenting the August 2015 Palo Alto dinner (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) attended by Thiel, Musk, Hoffman, Zuckerberg, and Ito. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mark-zuckerbergs-wild-dinner-with-epstein-revealed-in-files/ +[^3]: "Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations." *Axios,* September 12, 2019. https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations +[^4]: "Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations to MIT." *Axios,* September 12, 2019. https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations +[^5]: "MIT releases results of fact-finding on engagements with Jeffrey Epstein." *MIT News,* January 10, 2020, releasing the Goodwin Procter report (donations totaling 850,000 dollars across 2002-2017). https://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-releases-results-fact-finding-report-jeffrey-epstein-0110 ; "Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein's Interactions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Goodwin Procter LLP, January 2020. https://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/files/MIT-report.pdf diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jonathan Levin.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jonathan Levin.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0e130662 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Jonathan Levin.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - JonathanLevin + - StanfordUniversity + - Economics + - MarketDesign + - ClarkMedal + - AcademicLeadership +alias: + - Jonathan David Levin +summary: "Jonathan Levin is an American economist who won the 2011 John Bates Clark Medal, served as dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 2016 to 2024, and became the thirteenth president of Stanford University in August 2024." +born: 1972-11-17 +location: "New Haven, Connecticut (born)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jonathan Levin (born November 17, 1972) is an American economist who won the 2011 John Bates Clark Medal, served as dean of the [[Stanford Graduate School of Business|Stanford Graduate School of Business]] from 2016 to 2024, and became the thirteenth president of [[Stanford University]] in August 2024. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026, which identified him as the president of Stanford University.[^1] + +### A Family of University Presidents + +Levin was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the economist Richard Levin, who served as the twenty-second president of [[Yale University|Yale University]] from 1993 to 2013. The two are both economists who became presidents of elite American universities, a pairing that framed the coverage of Jonathan Levin's appointment, and Stanford itself published a joint interview with father and son on university leadership. He took dual undergraduate degrees from Stanford in 1994, a bachelor of arts in English and a bachelor of science in mathematics, then an MPhil in economics from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1996, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 under [[Bengt Holmström|Bengt Holmström]].[^2][^3] + +He joined the Stanford economics faculty in 2000 as an assistant professor, became a full professor by 2008 as the Holbrook Working Professor of Price Theory, and chaired the economics department from 2011 to 2014. His research spans industrial organization and microeconomic theory, including relational and incomplete contracts, market design and auctions, asymmetric information in credit markets, health insurance, and radio-spectrum allocation.[^3][^4] + +### The Clark Medal and the Stanford Presidency + +Levin received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2011, awarded by the American Economic Association to the American economist under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought. He became the tenth dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2016, holding the post for eight years through 2024 while also holding the Philip H. Knight professorship. From 2021 to 2025 he served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under President Biden, appointed in September 2021; his work on radio-spectrum auctions and internet market design is his principal bridge to the technology industry, though no public corporate board seat for the economist is documented.[^4][^5] + +The Stanford Board of Trustees announced Levin's appointment as the thirteenth president of Stanford on April 4, 2024, and he took office on August 1, 2024. He succeeded the classicist Richard Saller, who had served as interim president since September 2023, after [[Marc Tessier-Lavigne|Marc Tessier-Lavigne]] resigned effective August 31, 2023, following a research-misconduct scandal. A Stanford-commissioned panel, prompted by *Stanford Daily* reporting that began in November 2022, found data manipulation in papers from Tessier-Lavigne's laboratories; the panel found no evidence that he personally committed or knew of the manipulation but concluded that he had failed to "decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."[^6][^7] + +### Stanford and the Thiel Network + +Thiel took a bachelor of arts in philosophy at Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, and as a sophomore in 1987 founded *[[The Stanford Review|The Stanford Review]],* the conservative-libertarian student newspaper that a *Stanford Politics* investigation later described as "one of the surest paths to success in Silicon Valley." The investigation documented roughly three hundred employment relationships between Review alumni and about sixty institutions founded by Thiel or [[Joe Lonsdale|Joe Lonsdale]]. [[David Sacks]] was a later editor-in-chief of the Review and a Stanford undergraduate in the class of 1994, [[Keith Rabois|Keith Rabois]] was its opinion editor in the class of 1991, and Lonsdale and Palantir cofounder [[Stephen Cohen|Stephen Cohen]] were Stanford undergraduates and Review affiliates.[^8][^9] + +[[Rene Girard|René Girard]], the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, taught at Stanford, and Thiel took his courses as an undergraduate in the late 1980s; Girard's mimetic theory became foundational to Thiel's worldview, and Thiel spoke at Girard's memorial after his death in November 2015. [[Alex Karp|Alex Karp]], Thiel's [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]] cofounder, took his JD at Stanford Law in the same 1992 class as Thiel, where the two met, though Karp's undergraduate degree is from Haverford College and his doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt. [[Reid Hoffman|Reid Hoffman]] met Thiel as a Stanford undergraduate, where he studied symbolic systems before taking a philosophy degree at Oxford. The [[Hoover Institution|Hoover Institution]] fellow and former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, who hosts the program *Uncommon Knowledge,* has interviewed Thiel within the same conservative-Stanford orbit.[^10][^11][^12] + +The network continued to operate through Stanford institutions during Levin's tenure as dean. In January 2018 the Stanford "Cardinal Conversations" series opened with an event titled "Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on Technology and Politics," moderated by [[Niall Ferguson|Niall Ferguson]] under the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute. The *Stanford Daily* reported that an invitation found in the Epstein files indicates Levin attended Dialog's 2013 retreat, more than a decade before the 2026 leak.[^12][^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Stanford appoints son of former Yale president Rick Levin as president." *Yale Daily News,* April 5, 2024. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/04/05/stanford-appoints-son-of-former-yale-president-rick-levin-as-president/ +[^3]: "Jonathan Levin." American Economic Association, John Bates Clark Medalist page. https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/honors-awards/bates-clark/jonathan-levin +[^4]: "Dean Jonathan Levin." Stanford Graduate School of Business. https://gsb.stanford.edu/experience/news-history/history/deans/dean-jonathan-levin +[^5]: "Biden announces members of PCAST." The White House, September 22, 2021. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/pcast/briefing-room/2021/09/22/biden-announces-members-of-pcast/ +[^6]: "Jonathan Levin named Stanford president." Stanford Report, April 4, 2024. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/04/announcement +[^7]: "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least 3 papers." *The Stanford Daily,* July 19, 2023. https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/ +[^8]: "The Stanford Review and the making of the PayPal Mafia." *Stanford Politics,* November 27, 2017. https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story/ +[^9]: "Peter Thiel launched a student newspaper 36 years ago." *Fortune,* 2023. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-launched-student-newspaper-140000199.html +[^10]: "Peter Thiel on René Girard." Luke Burgis, *Anti-Mimetic.* https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/peter-thiel-on-rene-girard +[^11]: "Alex Karp '89 is emerging from the shadows." *The Haverford Clerk.* https://haverfordclerk.com/alex-karp-89-is-emerging-from-the-shadows/ +[^12]: "Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on technology and politics." Stanford Report, February 2018. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/02/cardinal-conversation-reid-hoffman-peter-thiel-technology-politics +[^13]: "Levin, Stanford alumni appear on list of Peter Thiel 'Dialog' society affiliates." *The Stanford Daily,* June 16, 2026. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/06/16/levin-stanford-alumni-appear-on-list-of-peter-thiel-dialog-society-affiliates/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Julian Huxley.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Julian Huxley.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..83c442f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Julian Huxley.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - Eugenics + - Transhumanism + - UNESCO + - EvolutionaryBiology + - Hereditarianism +alias: + - Julian Huxley + - Sir Julian Huxley + - Julian Sorell Huxley +summary: "Julian Huxley was the evolutionary biologist who coined the modern usage of transhumanism in 1957, served as the first Director-General of UNESCO and wrote a founding document tying the agency to eugenics, and presided over the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962." +born: 1887-06-22 +died: 1975-02-14 +location: "London, England; Paris, France" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Julian Sorell Huxley (June 22, 1887 to February 14, 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, science popularizer, and eugenicist who coined the modern usage of "[[Transhumanism|transhumanism]]" in 1957. He was the grandson of the Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the elder brother of the novelist [[Aldous Huxley]]. He was an architect of the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics, the first Director-General of [[UNESCO]] from 1946 to 1948, a cofounder of the [[World Wildlife Fund]] in 1961, and president of the British [[Eugenics|Eugenics]] Society from 1959 to 1962. He was knighted in 1958.[^1][^2] + +### The Modern Synthesis and Evolutionary Humanism + +Huxley's standing as a biologist rested on *Evolution: The Modern Synthesis* (1942), which named and consolidated the mid-twentieth-century reconciliation of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian and population genetics. The book gathered the work of theorists such as R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright into a unified account in which selection acting on Mendelian variation drives evolution, and the phrase "modern synthesis" entered biology as its standard name. Huxley was also a prolific popularizer who reached mass audiences through radio, the *Brains Trust* broadcasts, and books, and who directed the London Zoo as secretary of the Zoological Society of London.[^1][^3] + +From evolution Huxley derived a secular creed he called "evolutionary humanism," the view that humanity, having become through evolution the agent of its own further development, bears responsibility for consciously directing the future course of life on earth. He set this out across decades in works including *Religion Without Revelation* (1927) and *Essays of a Humanist* (1964), and served as the first president of the British Humanist Association. Evolutionary humanism placed the improvement of the human genetic and cultural inheritance at the center of human purpose, and it carried his lifelong commitment to eugenics inside an optimistic, progressive frame.[^1][^4] + +### UNESCO and Its Eugenic Charter + +Appointed the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1946, Huxley wrote a sixty-page founding statement, *UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy* (1946), that set out the philosophical basis for the new agency as he understood it. The document grounded UNESCO's mission in evolutionary humanism and argued that the agency should foster a single emerging world culture and advance the scientific study and improvement of human populations. Member states never adopted Huxley's text as official policy, and his term was cut to two years, but the statement stands as his programmatic vision for the body.[^2][^5] + +The document tied the agency explicitly to eugenics. Huxley wrote that "even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." He framed the task as one of moving eugenics from the impossible to the thinkable, charging UNESCO with preparing public opinion for measures that the recent association of eugenics with Nazi policy had made unspeakable.[^2][^5] + +### The Eugenics Society and Race + +Huxley's involvement with the British Eugenics Society spanned his career: he served as a vice-president in the 1930s and 1940s and as president from 1959 to 1962. He delivered the society's Galton Lecture in 1936 under the title "Eugenics and Society," and he advocated a "reform eugenics" that emphasized voluntary measures, birth control, and the genetic effects of class and environment over the cruder race-typology of the older movement. He nonetheless retained the foundational premise that the genetic quality of human populations could and should be deliberately managed, and he warned of the dysgenic effects of differential birth rates between social classes.[^4][^6] + +Huxley's record on race was mixed by the standards of his contemporaries. He coauthored *We Europeans* (1935) with the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, a book that attacked the pseudoscientific race doctrines of Nazi Germany and argued that the term "race" be replaced with "ethnic group," and he lent his name to the UNESCO Statement on Race tradition. He continued at the same time to hold that human groups differ in average innate mental capacity and that selective reproduction was a legitimate aim, positions that kept him within the hereditarian tradition founded by [[Francis Galton]].[^4][^6] + +### Coining Transhumanism + +Huxley introduced the modern usage of "transhumanism" in the title essay of his collection *New Bottles for New Wine* (1957). He wrote that "the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself, not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity," and proposed: "We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." He added, "I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man."[^7][^8] + +For Huxley transhumanism was the practical expression of evolutionary humanism, the program by which a self-aware humanity would take charge of its own biological and psychological evolution through science. [[Nick Bostrom]]'s history of the movement credits Huxley with the term's modern coinage, and the critics [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] place him, alongside Galton, among the eugenic progenitors of the [[TESCREAL]] bundle of transhumanism, [[Extropianism|extropianism]], [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]], and the related ideologies that now animate the artificial-intelligence industry.[^7][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Sir Julian Huxley," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on his life, the modern synthesis, UNESCO, and the Eugenics Society. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Huxley +[^2]: Huxley, Julian. *UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy.* Preparatory Commission of UNESCO, 1946, on the founding statement and his term as first Director-General. +[^3]: Huxley, Julian. *Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.* Allen and Unwin, 1942. +[^4]: Huxley, Julian. *Essays of a Humanist.* Chatto and Windus, 1964; with *We Europeans* (with A. C. Haddon, 1935) and the Galton Lecture "Eugenics and Society" (1936), on evolutionary humanism, race, and reform eugenics. +[^5]: "Julian S Huxley, the man who put eugenics into UNESCO," *Aeon,* on the 1946 document and the "unthinkable may at least become thinkable" passage. https://aeon.co/essays/julian-s-huxley-the-man-who-put-eugenics-into-unesco +[^6]: "Julian Huxley and eugenics," on his vice-presidency, presidency from 1959 to 1962, reform eugenics, and views on race and differential fertility. http://julianhuxleyeugenics.blogspot.com/p/huxley-and-eugenics.html +[^7]: Huxley, Julian. *New Bottles for New Wine.* Chatto and Windus, 1957, on the coinage of "transhumanism" in the title essay. +[^8]: Huxley, Julian, "Transhumanism," *New Bottles for New Wine* (1957), quoted text. https://www.huxley.net/transhumanism/ +[^9]: Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought," *Journal of Evolution and Technology,* 2005, crediting Huxley with the modern coinage. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Leonard Leo.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Leonard Leo.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..123b9113 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Leonard Leo.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - LeonardLeo + - FederalistSociety + - TeneoNetwork + - DarkMoney + - SupremeCourt + - JudicialCrisisNetwork + - ConcordFund +alias: + - Leonard Anthony Leo +summary: "Leonard Leo is an American conservative legal activist, the longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, the principal architect of the Supreme Court conservative supermajority through the Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett confirmations, and the chairman of Teneo Network, who has directed approximately one billion dollars in dark-money spending through a network of linked 501(c)(4) vehicles to reshape the American judiciary." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Leonard Leo is an American conservative legal activist who served as the longtime executive vice president of the [[Federalist Society|Federalist Society]] and who has been the principal architect of the [[Supreme Court|Supreme Court]]'s conservative supermajority through his role advising President [[Donald Trump]] on the selection and confirmation of [[Neil Gorsuch|Neil Gorsuch]] (2017), [[Brett Kavanaugh|Brett Kavanaugh]] (2018), and [[Amy Coney Barrett|Amy Coney Barrett]] (2020). Leo became chairman of the [[Teneo Network|Teneo Network]] in 2021 and has directed approximately one billion dollars in dark-money spending through a network of linked 501(c)(4) vehicles, including the [[Judicial Crisis Network|Judicial Crisis Network]] (now the [[Concord Fund|Concord Fund]]), to reshape the American judiciary and, through the Teneo chairmanship, to extend the operational model across American institutional life.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Federalist Society and the Judicial-Selection Project + +Leo's career at the Federalist Society began in the 1990s and he rose to executive vice president, the operational principal of the organization. The Federalist Society is the conservative legal-networking organization that functions as the pipeline for federal judicial nominations under Republican administrations, and Leo's role placed him at the center of the selection process for every conservative federal judge confirmed across the [[George W. Bush|George W. Bush]] and Trump administrations. Leo assisted [[Clarence Thomas|Clarence Thomas]] in his 1991 confirmation hearings and subsequently led the confirmation campaigns for [[John Roberts|John Roberts]], [[Samuel Alito|Samuel Alito]], Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.[^1][^4] + +The *ProPublica* profile "We Don't Talk About Leonard" (March 2023) is the foundational investigative document on Leo's role. The profile documents how Leo advised Trump on all three Supreme Court nominations, how the Federalist Society's judicial-selection pipeline fed the nominations, and how the dark-money infrastructure funded the confirmation campaigns. [[Senator Sheldon Whitehouse|Senator Sheldon Whitehouse]] (D-RI) has documented on the Senate floor and in Senate Judiciary Committee proceedings that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were the "big prize" for Leo's dark-money donors, locking in a conservative majority that delivered subsequent wins for the Republican donor interests.[^2][^5] + +### The Dark-Money Infrastructure + +Leo's dark-money operation runs through a network of linked 501(c)(4) organizations that permit political spending without donor disclosure. The primary vehicle is the Judicial Crisis Network (now the Concord Fund), which [[CREW|Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington]] reported brought in nearly 48.1 million dollars in a single reporting period to support the conservative judicial-confirmations project. The broader network of Leo-linked organizations has funneled over one billion dollars in undisclosed spending across the judicial-selection, political-advocacy, and institutional-influence operations, per the [[Alliance for Justice|Alliance for Justice]] and [[ProPublica|ProPublica]] investigations.[^2][^5][^6] + +The dark-money infrastructure operates through a layered structure of 501(c)(4) social-welfare organizations and 501(c)(3) charities that transfer funds to each other in chains designed to obscure the original donors. The [[Senate Judiciary Committee|Senate Judiciary Committee]] under Chairman [[Dick Durbin|Dick Durbin]] has sought Leo's records and testimony; Leo has declined to comply, and his counsel's letter to the Committee (July 2023) pushed back on the "dark money" and "phony front groups" characterizations. The investigative record relies on leaked tax filings, whistleblower disclosures, and the reporting of ProPublica, CREW, and the Alliance for Justice.[^3][^7] + +### The Teneo Chairmanship and the Institutional Expansion + +Leo became chairman of the Teneo Network in 2021, bringing the dark-money infrastructure he had built through the Federalist Society, the Judicial Crisis Network, and the broader conservative-judicial operation into a network whose stated goal (per the ProPublica investigation) is to "crush liberal dominance" across American law, finance, media, academia, and culture. The Teneo chairmanship extended the Leo operational model from the courts, where it had succeeded in producing the conservative supermajority, to the rest of American institutional life.[^8] + +The Leo-Thiel relationship runs through the shared dark-money infrastructure and the shared Teneo-network institutional terrain. The [[Peter Thiel|Thiel]]-tied [[Per Aspera Policy|Per Aspera Policy]] vehicle that steered funds to the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values PAC]] for the [[JD Vance|JD Vance]] Senate campaign operates in the same 501(c)(4) dark-money ecosystem as the Leo-linked vehicles, and both networks operate through the Teneo Network for the broader institutional-placement function.[^8][^9] + +### The Trump Schism + +Trump publicly attacked Leo in 2025, calling him someone who "probably hates America." The *CBS Evening News* reported on the schism between the president whose judicial selections Leo had architected and the operative who had built the selection infrastructure. The attack followed documented tensions within the post-2024 Republican coalition over personnel choices and strategic direction, with Leo reported to be frustrated with the Trump administration's appointments outside the judicial pipeline.[^10] + +The schism did not affect the underlying judicial infrastructure. The Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett confirmations are permanent, and the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court is the structural outcome Leo's operation produced. The supermajority delivered the 2022 [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization|Dobbs]] decision overturning [[Roe v. Wade|Roe v. Wade]], the expansion of [[Second Amendment|Second Amendment]] gun rights, the rollback of federal regulatory authority under the [[major questions doctrine|major questions doctrine]], and the presidential-immunity ruling in [[Trump v. United States|Trump v. United States]] (2024).[^10] + +Leo's response to the Trump attack was measured. He did not publicly retract his support for the judicial-selection infrastructure, and his network continued to operate through the Teneo Network chairmanship and the Concord Fund / JCN dark-money operation. The schism is a documented internal-republican conflict between the electoral and institutional wings of the coalition, not a dismantling of the judicial infrastructure that both wings had built together.[^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Leonard Leo." *Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonard-Leo +[^2]: "We Don't Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right's Supreme Court Supermajority." *ProPublica,* March 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority +[^3]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents +[^4]: "The man who helped roll back abortion rights now wants to 'crush liberal dominance.'" *NPR,* November 25, 2024, on Leo's 25-year Federalist Society career and the conservative judicial pipeline. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2024/11/25/nx-s1-5199049/the-man-who-helped-roll-back-abortion-rights-now-wants-to-crush-liberal-dominance/ +[^5]: "With Supreme Court Mired in Dark Money, Time for Large Dose of Transparency." *Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.* https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/op-eds/with-supreme-court-mired-in-dark-money-time-for-large-dose-of-transparency/ +[^6]: "Group Behind Trump SCOTUS Picks Brought in Nearly $50 Million in Secret Money." *CREW.* https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/group-behind-trump-scotus-picks-brought-in-nearly-50-million-in-secret-money/ +[^7]: Leo counsel's letter to Senate Judiciary Committee, July 25, 2023. https://levin-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2023-7-25-Leo-counsels-ltr-to-Senate-Judiciary-declining-to-produce-requested-information.pdf +[^8]: "Inside the Teneo Network, which promises to 'crush liberal dominance.'" *CT Mirror,* March 12, 2023, on Leo's 2021 Teneo chairmanship and its cross-institutional program. https://ctmirror.org/2023/03/12/teneo-network-conservative-federalist-society-liberal/ +[^9]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC spending on 2022 election." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022, on the Per Aspera Policy transfer to the pro-Vance Protect Ohio Values PAC. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ +[^10]: "Trump Attacked Leonard Leo, a Onetime Ally and Key Adviser on Judicial Picks." *CBS Evening News,* 2025. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Marvin Minsky.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Marvin Minsky.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6d3c04be --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Marvin Minsky.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - MIT + - ArtificialIntelligence + - CognitiveScience + - SciencePhilanthropy +alias: + - Marvin Minsky + - Marvin Lee Minsky +summary: "Marvin Minsky was an MIT cognitive scientist who co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, took funding from Jeffrey Epstein, and was named in a 2019 unsealed deposition by Virginia Giuffre, an allegation his widow disputed." +born: 1927-08-09 +died: 2016-01-24 +location: "Boston, Massachusetts" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 to January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] who co-founded the [[MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]] and was a central figure in the founding of [[artificial intelligence]] as a field. He received funding from [[Jeffrey Epstein]] and organized a 2002 conference financed by Epstein in the U.S. Virgin Islands; in 2019 an unsealed deposition by [[Virginia Giuffre]] named Minsky, an allegation his widow [[Gloria Rudisch]] disputed.[^1][^2] + +### MIT and the Founding of Artificial Intelligence + +Minsky earned a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1954 and joined MIT, where in 1959 he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with [[John McCarthy]]. He helped organize the 1956 [[Dartmouth Summer Research Project]], the workshop, convened with McCarthy, [[Claude Shannon]], and [[Nathaniel Rochester]], at which the term artificial intelligence was adopted. His honors included the [[Turing Award]] in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001.[^3][^1] + +Minsky's research spanned neural networks, robotics, and theories of mind. With [[Seymour Papert]] he wrote *Perceptrons* (MIT Press, 1969), a mathematical critique of single-layer neural networks showing that such a network cannot compute the exclusive-or function; the book is often credited with redirecting funding and research away from connectionist approaches and contributing to the first AI funding winter, before multilayer networks revived the field in the 1980s. His 1986 book *The Society of Mind* (Simon & Schuster) argued that intelligence emerges from the interaction of many simple, mindless agents, and he developed the related "frames" model of knowledge representation.[^4][^3] + +Minsky invented the confocal scanning microscope in 1957 and, with Papert, helped build early robotic and machine-vision systems at the MIT AI Laboratory. He later joined the [[MIT Media Lab]] founded by [[Nicholas Negroponte]], where he held the Toshiba Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences and remained active until his death. He continued to argue for symbolic and architectural approaches to general intelligence, developing the ideas in *The Society of Mind* into his 2006 book *The Emotion Machine*.[^3][^4] + +### Epstein Funding and the 2002 Symposium + +Epstein donated $100,000 to Minsky in 2002, several years before Epstein's 2008 conviction. According to MIT's January 2020 review by the law firm [[Goodwin Procter]] and emails reported by *MIT Technology Review*, Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte described Minsky as Epstein's closest friend at MIT, writing that Minsky "even visited him in jail." Minsky's ties predated the Media Lab's later, separately scrutinized funding from Epstein under [[Joi Ito]].[^2][^5] + +After Minsky's death in 2016, Negroponte and Ito discussed whether Epstein could attend an on-campus memorial; Negroponte said Epstein would be welcome, but Ito instructed Epstein to stay away from the memorial and an associated reception. A Media Lab staff member later circulated memorial photographs with a note asking that they be posted only "as long as Jeffrey Epstein does not appear in any of the photos."[^2][^5] + +In April 2002 Minsky organized a three-day artificial-intelligence meeting, the St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium, held April 14 to 16, 2002, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and funded by Epstein. The proceedings were published by Minsky, [[Push Singh]], and [[Aaron Sloman]] as "The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium: Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence" in *AI Magazine* in 2004. Around twenty scientists attended, most of them men, including [[Roger Schank]], [[Doug Lenat]], [[Ken Forbus]], [[Henry Lieberman]], [[Vernor Vinge]], and [[Linda Stone]]. Schank later recalled that Epstein "walks into the conference with two girls on his arm" and sat "in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls." Epstein separately funded a 2006 physics gathering convened by [[Lawrence Krauss]] on Epstein's island that drew physicists including [[Stephen Hawking]].[^6][^7] + +### Giuffre Allegation and the Dispute + +In a deposition given in May 2016 and unsealed in August 2019 as part of a defamation suit brought against [[Ghislaine Maxwell]], Virginia Giuffre stated that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky when Minsky visited Epstein's compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands, when she was seventeen and Minsky was in his seventies. Giuffre's claim named Minsky among several prominent men she said she was instructed to have sexual contact with. Minsky, who had died in January 2016, never had an opportunity to respond, and no lawsuit was filed against his estate.[^8][^1] + +Minsky's widow, the pediatrician Gloria Rudisch, disputed the allegation, saying that she and her husband were "always together" during their visits and that the encounter Giuffre described did not happen. None of the men named in Giuffre's deposition was criminally charged or named as a defendant in civil suits arising from her account, and Giuffre's deposition is the only source for the claim against Minsky.[^9][^2] + +The 2019 MIT review and records reported in 2025 and 2026 indicated that Minsky and Rudisch had contact with Epstein over multiple years, including visits to his island. The renewed release of U.S. Department of Justice files in 2026 returned attention to Minsky alongside other scientists in Epstein's orbit, though the allegation against Minsky has not been adjudicated and rests on Giuffre's account.[^2][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Marvin Minsky (1927-2016), artificial intelligence pioneer," Legacy.com, on Minsky's birth and death dates, the 1959 co-founding of the MIT AI Laboratory with McCarthy, the Turing Award, and his survival by Gloria Rudisch. https://www.legacy.com/news/marvin-minsky-1927-2016 +[^2]: "Eight revelations from MIT's Jeffrey Epstein report," *MIT Technology Review,* January 10, 2020, on the $100,000 grant in 2002, the Negroponte "closest friend" and "visited him in jail" emails, the memorial episode, and the unsealed Giuffre allegation. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/10/130928/mit-jeffrey-epstein-donations-media-lab-joi-ito-seth-lloyd-funding-ethics/ +[^3]: Lohr, Steve. "Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88," *The New York Times,* January 25, 2016, on the Dartmouth project, the AI Lab, and the cause of death. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/business/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html +[^4]: Minsky, Marvin. *The Society of Mind.* Simon & Schuster, 1986. +[^5]: "MIT professor 'entirely willing' Epstein associate," *Fox News,* 2020, on Minsky's relationship with Epstein as described in the MIT review. https://www.foxnews.com/us/mit-professor-jeffrey-epstein-associate-entirely-willing +[^6]: "What it was like to be a scientist in Jeffrey Epstein's circle," *Slate,* August 2019, on the April 2002 AI meeting organized by Minsky, the roughly twenty attendees, Schank's recollection, and the 2006 Krauss conference. https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science-eugenics-sexual-abuse-researchers.html +[^7]: "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Forgotten AI Summit," Investor News Today, 2025, on the St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium of April 2002 and its attendees. https://investornewstoday.com/2025/08/05/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-forgotten-ai-summit/ +[^8]: Brown, Stephanie, et al. "Jeffrey Epstein ordered teen girl to have sex with powerful men, accuser says," *NBC News,* August 9, 2019, on the deposition's unsealing and Giuffre's naming of Minsky. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-ordered-teen-girl-have-sex-powerful-men-accuser-n1040996 +[^9]: "AI Pioneer Accused of Having Sex With Trafficking Victim On Jeffrey Epstein's Island," *Slashdot,* August 9, 2019, on Rudisch's denial that the encounter occurred and that no estate lawsuit was filed. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/08/09/2244200/ai-pioneer-accused-of-having-sex-with-trafficking-victim-on-jeffrey-epsteins-island diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Max More.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Max More.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e253c843 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Max More.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - MaxMore + - Extropianism + - Transhumanism + - Cryonics + - Libertarianism +summary: "Max More is a British-born philosopher who coined the term extropy, founded the Extropy Institute and the libertarian-transhumanist movement of the 1990s, and later ran the Alcor cryonics foundation." +born: 1964 +location: "Scottsdale, Arizona" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Max More (born Max O'Connor in 1964 in [[Bristol]], England) is a philosopher and futurist who founded [[Extropianism]], the libertarian strand of [[Transhumanism|transhumanism]] that shaped the technological optimism of [[Silicon Valley]]'s elite. He coined the term "extropy" in 1988, founded the [[Extropy Institute]], and through its 1990s mailing list helped assemble the subculture from which [[Nick Bostrom]]'s [[Longtermism|longtermism]], the [[Rationalist Community]], and parts of the cryptocurrency world emerged. He later ran the cryonics organization [[Alcor Life Extension Foundation]].[^1][^2] + +### The Extropian Project + +More changed his surname from O'Connor to More to signify his commitment to perpetual self-improvement. He read philosophy, politics, and economics at St Anne's College, [[University of Oxford|Oxford]], graduating in 1987, then moved to the United States and completed a doctorate in philosophy at the [[University of Southern California]] in 1995, with a dissertation examining the nature of death and personal identity through change. With the lawyer [[Tom W. Bell]] he launched *Extropy* magazine in 1988 and the Extropy Institute in the early 1990s. He authored the movement's founding documents, including the "Principles of Extropy" and the "Proactionary Principle," a pro-technology rule of conduct framed against the precautionary principle, and his 1999 "Letter to Mother Nature" declared an intention to redesign the human organism. His program fused radical life extension, mind uploading, artificial intelligence, and [[Anarcho-Capitalism|anarcho-capitalist]] politics into a single futurist creed.[^1][^3] + +Through the Extropy Institute's 1990s mailing list More convened the network of nanotechnology theorists, cryptographers, and AI researchers from which the later transhumanist and AI-risk institutions drew, and he hosted the EXTRO conference series from 1994 to 1999. His "Principles of Extropy," revised across several versions, set out the tenets of perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-direction, and rational thinking, defining "extropy" itself as the extent of a system's intelligence, functional order, vitality, and capacity for improvement. He married the transhumanist artist and theorist [[Natasha Vita-More]] in 1996, and the two became the movement's most visible couple.[^2][^3] + +### Cryonics and Later Career + +More became chief executive of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the [[Scottsdale]], [[Arizona]] cryonics company that preserves human bodies and brains at low temperature in the expectation of future revival, effective January 1, 2011, and held the post until 2020. His advocacy for cryonics and life extension prefigured the longevity and anti-aging interests later funded across the [[Peter Thiel]] network.[^2][^4] + +Under More, Alcor's roster of cryopreserved "patients" grew to include the futurist FM-2030, the science-fiction figure who had inspired parts of the transhumanist movement, and the Bitcoin pioneer [[Hal Finney]], who died of ALS in 2014 and was preserved at the facility shortly after his death. Alcor charged on the order of 200,000 dollars for whole-body preservation and 80,000 dollars for neuropreservation of the head alone, funded through life-insurance policies taken out by members, and held roughly 150 patients in cryostasis by the time More stepped down. After leaving the chief-executive role he continued as an ambassador and advisor for the organization.[^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Transhumanism," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Max More, the coining of "extropy," and the Extropy Institute. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism +[^2]: Evans, Jules. "How did transhumanism become the religion of the super-rich?" on Max More, the extropians, and the movement's reach into Silicon Valley. https://julesevans.medium.com/how-did-transhumanism-become-the-religion-of-the-super-rich-d670a410b01a +[^3]: More, Max. "The Principles of Extropy," "The Proactionary Principle," and "A Letter to Mother Nature," Extropy Institute, 1990 to 1999; and "About," maxmore.com, on the 1987 Oxford PPE degree from St Anne's College, the 1995 USC philosophy doctorate, and the 1996 marriage to Natasha Vita-More. https://www.maxmore.com/about/ +[^4]: "Alcor Life Extension Foundation Names Max More, PhD, as Chief Executive Officer," Alcor, on the January 1, 2011 appointment; and "200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility," *Smithsonian,* on the patient roster (including FM-2030 and Hal Finney), the roughly 200,000 dollar whole-body and 80,000 dollar neuropreservation fees, and the patient count. https://www.alcor.org/resources/blog/alcor-life-extension-foundation-names-max-more-phd-as-chief-executive-officer/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Michael Murphy.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Michael Murphy.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1b1ffc04 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Michael Murphy.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +category: "Authors & Journalists" +tags: + - Person + - MichaelMurphy + - EsalenInstitute + - HumanPotentialMovement + - SriAurobindo + - CitizenDiplomacy + - Parapsychology +alias: + - Michael Murphy + - Mike Murphy +summary: "Michael Murphy is the Stanford-trained cofounder of Esalen Institute and a theorist of transformative human capacities who carried the Human Potential movement toward later wellness and technology culture." +born: 1930 +location: "Big Sur, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Michael Murphy (born September 3, 1930, in Salinas, California) is an American writer and the cofounder, with Richard Price, of the [[Esalen Institute]], the Big Sur retreat center that became the seedbed of the Human Potential movement. A Stanford psychology graduate who spent sixteen months at the [[Sri Aurobindo]] Ashram in India, Murphy built a body of work, above all the 1992 book *The Future of the Body*, cataloguing what he called the "metanormal" or extraordinary capacities of human beings, and he steered Esalen from 1960s countercultural therapy through 1980s citizen diplomacy with the Soviet Union toward the wellness and technology circles of the present-day Bay Area.[^1][^2] + +### Stanford, Spiegelberg, and Sri Aurobindo + +Murphy was raised in Salinas in an Episcopalian family and entered Stanford University as a pre-med student. In April 1950 he wandered by mistake into a lecture on comparative religion by the scholar [[Frederic Spiegelberg]], an encounter that redirected him toward the integration of Eastern and Western thought; he described a transformative meditative experience by Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus in January 1951. He took a B.A. in psychology in 1952 and served two years as a U.S. Army psychologist stationed in Puerto Rico during the Korean War.[^1][^2] Spiegelberg, who taught the Indian philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and helped found the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, shaped a circle that drew both Murphy and the future Esalen cofounder Dick Price.[^2] + +From 1956 to 1957 Murphy practiced meditation for some sixteen to eighteen months at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, immersing himself in Aurobindo's "integral yoga," a system aimed at a progressive divinization of body and mind rather than escape from the world. Aurobindo's idea that evolution could continue consciously into supernormal human powers became the philosophical backbone of Murphy's later writing. On his return he met Price in 1960 in the Aurobindo-influenced milieu around San Francisco, and the two conceived the project that became Esalen.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Running Esalen + +In 1962 Murphy and Price opened Esalen on roughly 120 acres of clifftop land at Big Sur that Murphy's grandfather, the physician Henry Murphy, had bought in 1910. Murphy ran the institute through its formative decade, hosting [[Abraham Maslow]], [[Aldous Huxley]]'s legacy of "human potentialities," [[Fritz Perls]] and Gestalt therapy, [[Alan Watts]], and the encounter-group movement, before stepping back from day-to-day management in 1972 to concentrate on writing. He remained cofounder and chairman emeritus of the board and continued to direct Esalen's research arm, the Center for Theory and Research.[^2][^3] + +Murphy's interest in documenting exceptional human functioning became institutional at Esalen. In 1976 he launched what he called the Transformation Project, an effort to compile a scientific archive of extraordinary psychophysical capacities seen in sport, meditation, and healing traditions, the research base for his later books.[^4] Through the Center for Theory and Research, Esalen hosted conferences on meditation research from 1988 to 1995 that produced *The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation*, which Murphy wrote with Steven Donovan.[^4] + +### The Books on Human Capacities + +Murphy's first and most popular book was the 1972 novel *Golf in the Kingdom*, a mystical fable set on a Scottish links course that became a long-running bestseller and was later filmed; he followed it with the novel *Jacob Atabet* (1977) about a painter pursuing bodily transformation. With the parapsychology researcher Rhea White he published *The Psychic Side of Sports* (1978, later reissued as *In the Zone*), cataloguing reports of altered perception, telepathy, and other anomalous experiences among athletes.[^1][^5] + +His major nonfiction work, *The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature* (1992), is a sprawling cross-cultural compilation of documented cases of what Murphy termed metanormal functioning, exceptional perception, vitality, movement, and cognition, organized to argue that most ordinary human attributes have extraordinary expressions that point toward a further evolution. With [[George Leonard]], the Look editor who had coined "human potential movement," he wrote *The Life We Are Given* (1995) and cofounded Integral Transformative Practice, a structured program of long-term physical and contemplative training.[^1][^4] + +### Soviet Parapsychology and Citizen Diplomacy + +In the 1970s Murphy became absorbed in Soviet parapsychology and traveled to the USSR to meet its experimenters in telepathy and related phenomena, contacts that opened an unusual channel between Esalen and Soviet officialdom. In 1980, with official Cold War relations stalled, Murphy, his wife Dulce Murphy, and Jim Hickman founded the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, a "track-two" citizen-diplomacy effort that arranged exchanges of astronauts and cosmonauts, scientists, and writers and helped stage the first satellite "spacebridges" between Soviet and American citizens.[^6] + +The program invited Boris Yeltsin to make his first United States visit in September 1989, a tour that Yeltsin's biographers describe as sharpening his disillusionment with the Soviet system. Renamed Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy in 2004, the program outlived the Cold War, and Esalen's accounts credit it with helping create the atmosphere in which glasnost and perestroika unfolded. Murphy continued to write and to lead the Center for Theory and Research into his nineties.[^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Michael Murphy (author)," biographical summary, on his September 3, 1930 birth in Salinas, his B.A. in psychology from Stanford in 1952, the April 1950 Spiegelberg lecture, the January 1951 Lake Lagunita experience, his Army service in Puerto Rico, sixteen to eighteen months at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1956 to 1957, the 1962 founding of Esalen with Dick Price, his stepping back in 1972, and his books *Golf in the Kingdom* (1971), *The Future of the Body* (1992), and *The Life We Are Given* (1995). +[^2]: "Michael Murphy on Esalen and the mystical expats," Philosophy for Life, on Frederic Spiegelberg's comparative-religion teaching, the American Academy of Asian Studies, Sri Aurobindo's integral yoga, and Murphy's meeting with Price. https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/7670 +[^3]: "About Esalen: History, Mission, Vision, and Leadership," Esalen Institute, on Murphy as cofounder and chairman emeritus and his direction of the Center for Theory and Research. https://www.esalen.org/about +[^4]: "What is the Center for Theory & Research?" and "Past Initiatives at the Center for Theory & Research," Esalen, on the 1976 Transformation Project, the 1988 to 1995 meditation-research conferences, *The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation* with Steven Donovan, and Integral Transformative Practice with George Leonard. https://www.esalen.org/ctr-main +[^5]: Murphy, Michael, and Rhea A. White. *The Psychic Side of Sports.* Addison-Wesley, 1978; later reissued as *In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports* (1995). https://archive.org/details/psychicsideofsp000murp +[^6]: "Forty Years Later, Track Two Continues to Expand its Global Reach," Esalen Journal, on Murphy's 1970s interest in Soviet parapsychology, the 1980 founding of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program by Michael and Dulce Murphy and Jim Hickman, the spacebridges, the 1989 Yeltsin visit, and the 2004 renaming to Track Two; and "Michael Murphy Helped Launch Human Potential Movement More Than 40 Years Ago," Voice of America. https://www.esalen.org/post/forty-years-later-track-two-continues-to-expand-its-global-reach diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Mira Murati.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Mira Murati.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..88b3fe1d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Mira Murati.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - MiraMurati + - OpenAI + - ThinkingMachinesLab + - ArtificialIntelligence + - SiliconValley +alias: + - Mira Murati +summary: "Mira Murati is the Albanian-born engineer who rose to chief technology officer of OpenAI, oversaw the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora, served as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis, left in September 2024, and founded the AI lab Thinking Machines Lab." +born: 1988-12-16 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Mira Murati (born December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, [[Albania]]) is an engineer and technology executive who served as the chief technology officer of [[OpenAI]], where she oversaw the development of [[ChatGPT]], DALL-E, Codex, and the video model Sora, and who briefly served as the company's interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis that removed and reinstated [[Sam Altman]]. She left OpenAI in September 2024 and founded the AI lab [[Thinking Machines Lab]] in early 2025.[^1][^2] + +### From Tesla to OpenAI CTO + +Murati grew up in Albania as the country emerged from communist rule, attended a United World College in Canada, and took a mechanical-engineering degree from [[Dartmouth College]]. After internships at [[Goldman Sachs]] and a stint at the French aerospace group [[Zodiac Aerospace]], she spent three years at [[Tesla, Inc.|Tesla]] as a senior product manager for the Model X during the period when the company shipped early versions of its Autopilot driver-assistance software. In 2016 she joined [[Leap Motion]], a startup building hand- and finger-tracking sensors, as vice president of product and engineering, before moving to OpenAI in 2018.[^1][^2] + +At OpenAI Murati began as vice president of applied AI and partnerships and was promoted to chief technology officer in 2022. In that role she led the teams that built and shipped the company's most consequential products: the DALL-E image generators, the Codex model that powers GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and the Sora text-to-video system. She became one of the most prominent technical executives in the industry, describing OpenAI's iterative-deployment philosophy as a matter of putting "the technology in contact with reality" to learn from how people use it.[^1][^2] + +### Interim CEO and Departure + +When OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman on November 17, 2023, it named Murati interim chief executive. Her tenure lasted only days: within the weekend the board moved to install [[Emmett Shear]], the former chief executive of [[Twitch]], as a second interim leader, and Murati joined the roughly 700 employees who signed a letter demanding Altman's return and threatening to follow him to [[Microsoft]]. Altman was reinstated within the week, and Murati resumed her role as chief technology officer under the reconstituted board.[^3][^4] + +On September 25, 2024, Murati announced that she was leaving OpenAI, writing that "there is never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right." Her departure came amid a broader exodus of senior research leaders from the company, including [[Ilya Sutskever]], the chief scientist who had left that May, and the research executives Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, who left around the same time as Murati. Within months she had begun assembling a new lab from the same talent pool.[^4][^5] + +### Thinking Machines Lab + +In February 2025 Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab, a research company she founded with a team drawn heavily from OpenAI, including the cofounder and reinforcement-learning pioneer [[John Schulman]] as chief scientist, [[Barret Zoph]] as chief technology officer, and early staff such as [[Bob McGrew]], [[Lilian Weng]], [[Andrew Tulloch]], and [[Luke Metz]]. In July 2025 the company closed a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion-dollar valuation, led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], a deal reported as among the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history.[^5][^6] + +Murati positioned the company around accessible, customizable AI and an open-research posture, saying the lab would unveil its first work within months and would include "a significant open source offering" for researchers and startups building their own models. Bloomberg reported in 2026 that the company was in talks for a funding round that would value it near 50 billion dollars.[^6][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Who is Mira Murati? OpenAI's new interim CEO," *TechCrunch,* November 17, 2023, on her Albanian birth, Dartmouth degree, Zodiac Aerospace, Tesla Model X and Autopilot work, Leap Motion, joining OpenAI in 2018, and the products she oversaw as CTO. https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/who-is-mira-murati-openais-new-interim-ceo +[^2]: "Mira Murati Biography," aidigitalx, on her birthplace of Vlorë, December 16, 1988, her education, and her career path through Tesla and Leap Motion to OpenAI CTO. https://aidigitalx.com/mira-murati-biography-leading-ai-innovator/ +[^3]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023, on the November 2023 board crisis, the interim leadership sequence, and Emmett Shear. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained +[^4]: "OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says she's leaving the company," reporting on the September 25, 2024 departure and the "this moment feels right" statement. *CNBC,* September 25, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/25/openai-cto-mira-murati-announces-shes-leaving-the-company.html +[^5]: "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup," *Fortune,* February 6, 2025, on the founding of Thinking Machines Lab and the OpenAI-derived team. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic +[^6]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round," *TechCrunch,* July 15, 2025, on the roughly 2-billion seed round, the 12-billion valuation, the Andreessen Horowitz lead, and the open-source plans. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/ +[^7]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines seeks $50 billion valuation in funding talks," *Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance,* 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-seeks-212328387.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Neal Mohan.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Neal Mohan.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ad71f0fd --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Neal Mohan.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - NealMohan + - YouTube + - Google + - DoubleClick + - AdTech + - ContentModeration +alias: + - Neal Mohan +summary: "Neal Mohan is an American technology executive who built Google's display-advertising business after the DoubleClick acquisition, served as YouTube's chief product officer from 2015, and became chief executive of YouTube in February 2023." +born: 1973 +location: "Indiana, United States (born)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Neal Mohan (born 1973) is an American technology executive who led Google's display-advertising business following the company's acquisition of [[DoubleClick|DoubleClick]] in 2007, became chief product officer of [[YouTube|YouTube]] in 2015, and succeeded [[Susan Wojcicki|Susan Wojcicki]] as chief executive of YouTube in February 2023. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026, which identified him as the chief executive of YouTube.[^1] + +### From Indiana to Stanford + +Mohan was born in Indiana in 1973 to a father who had emigrated from India, and has recounted that his father "landed at JFK with 25 dollars in his pocket" after earning a doctorate in civil engineering. The family spent his early childhood in Michigan and moved to India before his high-school years, where Mohan has said he had to acquire "nine years' worth of Hindi and Sanskrit." He returned to the United States for university.[^2] + +He took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from [[Stanford University]] in 1996 and later an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2005, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. He serves on the Stanford Graduate School of Business management board.[^2] + +### DoubleClick and the Display-Advertising Build-Out + +Mohan began at the consultancy Andersen Consulting, later Accenture, in 1996, then joined the advertising-technology startup NetGravity, which was absorbed into DoubleClick. After his Stanford MBA and a brief period at [[Microsoft|Microsoft]], he returned to DoubleClick as senior vice president of strategy and product development, a role in which contemporaneous accounts describe him as central to the company's turnaround. Google announced its acquisition of DoubleClick for 3.1 billion dollars in cash on April 13, 2007, then its largest acquisition, buying the firm from the private-equity owner Hellman and Friedman; the deal closed on March 11, 2008, after European Commission clearance.[^3][^4] + +At Google, Mohan led the integration of DoubleClick and rose to senior vice president of display and video advertising, with responsibility for the Google Display Network, AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick programmatic platform, and YouTube advertising. The portfolio made him the executive most responsible for assembling Google's display-advertising backbone out of the acquired DoubleClick technology and the company's own ad products.[^3] + +### The 2011 Retention Package + +In 2011 Twitter sought to hire Mohan as its chief product officer, and Google countered with a restricted-stock grant reported at roughly 100 million dollars, vesting over three to four years, to keep him. The same TechCrunch report that disclosed the Mohan figure stated that Google gave [[Sundar Pichai|Sundar Pichai]], then leading Chrome, a grant of roughly 50 million dollars in the same period, and that the company may have committed as much as 150 million dollars in stock to retain the two product executives. The episode is frequently misdated to 2013 in later coverage; the original reporting is from April 2011.[^5] + +The size of the grant marked Mohan as among the most valued product executives at Google years before he moved to YouTube, and the figure became a recurring point of reference in profiles of his career after his 2023 elevation to the YouTube chief executive role.[^5] + +### YouTube Product and the 2023 Chief Executive Appointment + +Mohan became YouTube's chief product officer in 2015, overseeing product, user experience, and trust and safety across the platform. Wojcicki credited him with pivotal roles in the launch of YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium, and Shorts, and with leading the trust-and-safety team responsible for content-moderation policy. On February 16, 2023, Wojcicki announced she was stepping down after roughly nine years leading YouTube and about twenty-five years at Google and named Mohan as her successor, the fourth person to lead YouTube. She wrote that with the work across "Shorts, streaming, and subscriptions, together with the promises of AI," Mohan was "the right person to lead us."[^6][^7] + +As chief executive, Mohan oversees a platform reporting more than two billion users and the top position in United States streaming watchtime by Nielsen measurement. YouTube advertising revenue reached 9.2 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2023, 10.47 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2024, and 11.38 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2025, with full-year 2025 revenue across advertising and subscriptions reported above 60 billion dollars. YouTube TV passed eight million subscribers by early 2024, and YouTube Premium and Music passed one hundred million customers. Mohan has stated that YouTube paid more than 100 billion dollars to creators, artists, and media companies over four years.[^8][^9][^10] + +### Content Moderation and the AI Posture + +Mohan's January 2026 annual letter named the management of artificial-intelligence "slop" a priority for the year while resisting preemptive bans, stating that as an open platform YouTube allows "a broad range of free expression" and would address low-quality automated content through existing spam and clickbait systems rather than new prohibitions. The letter announced parental controls including the ability to "set the timer to zero" for Shorts, which the company called an industry first, and reported that more than one million channels used YouTube's artificial-intelligence creation tools daily in December 2025. The recommendation algorithm, content-moderation policy, and the boundary between permitted and removed content sit under the chief executive's authority over a platform that reaches a substantial share of the global internet audience.[^11][^12] + +Mohan has held outside corporate board seats during his Google tenure. He joined the board of the apparel company Stitch Fix effective October 21, 2020, served on the board of the genetics company [[23andMe|23andMe]], from which he resigned in September 2024 amid the mass departure of independent directors in a dispute with chief executive Anne Wojcicki, and was elected to the board of [[Starbucks|Starbucks]] in an announcement dated January 9, 2024.[^13][^14][^15] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "My father landed in US with 25 dollars in pocket: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan shares childhood memories of India." *Business Today,* November 1, 2023. https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/story/my-father-landed-in-us-with-usd-25-in-pocket-youtube-ceo-neal-mohan-shares-childhood-memories-of-india-404104-2023-11-01 +[^3]: "Neal Mohan, MBA '05: CEOs and content creators, be true to yourself." *Stanford Graduate School of Business,* December 2023. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/neal-mohan-mba-05-ceos-content-creators-be-true-yourself +[^4]: "Google to buy DoubleClick for 3.1 billion dollars in cash." *CNBC,* April 13, 2007. https://www.cnbc.com/2007/04/13/google-agrees-to-buy-doubleclick-for-31-billion-in-cash.html +[^5]: "Google said to have high level mole at Twitter, makes massive counteroffers to retain employees." *TechCrunch,* April 6, 2011. https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-level-mole-at-twitter-makes-massive-counteroffers-to-retain-employees/ +[^6]: Wojcicki, Susan. "A personal update from Susan." *YouTube Official Blog,* February 16, 2023. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/a-personal-update-from-susan/ +[^7]: "Susan Wojcicki exiting YouTube CEO role, Neal Mohan to step up." *Deadline,* February 16, 2023. https://deadline.com/2023/02/susan-wojcicki-exiting-youtube-ceo-chief-product-office-neal-mohan-to-step-up-1235262007/ +[^8]: "Alphabet earnings, Q4 2023." *Tubefilter,* January 31, 2024. https://www.tubefilter.com/2024/01/31/alphabet-google-youtube-earnings-q4-2023-sundar-pichai-philipp-schindler/ +[^9]: "YouTube total revenue tops 60 billion dollars in 2025." *Variety,* 2026. https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/youtube-2025-total-revenue-ads-subscriptions-alphabet-earnings-1236652260/ +[^10]: "YouTube TV passes 8 million subscribers." *Variety,* February 2024. https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/youtube-tv-number-subscribers-8-million-1235895606/ +[^11]: "The future of YouTube, 2026." *YouTube Official Blog,* January 21, 2026. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-future-of-youtube-2026/ +[^12]: "YouTube chief says managing 'AI slop' is a priority for 2026." *CNBC,* January 21, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/youtube-chief-says-managing-ai-slop-is-a-priority-for-2026-.html +[^13]: "Stitch Fix adds Neal Mohan to board of directors." Stitch Fix newsroom, October 2020. https://newsroom.stitchfix.com/blog/stitch-fix-adds-neal-mohan-chief-product-officer-youtube-and-svp-google-to-board-of-director%E2%80%8Bs/ +[^14]: "23andMe board resigns, citing differences with CEO Anne Wojcicki." *Entrepreneur,* 2024. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/23andme-board-resigns-differences-with-ceo-anne-wojcicki/480073 +[^15]: "Starbucks elects Daniel Servitje, Neal Mohan and Mike Sievert to its board of directors." Starbucks press release, January 9, 2024. https://about.starbucks.com/press/2024/starbucks-elects-servitje-mohan-and-sievert-to-its-board-of-directors/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Nick Land.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Nick Land.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..818e4a65 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Nick Land.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - NickLand + - CCRU + - Accelerationism + - DarkEnlightenment + - Neoreaction + - Philosophy + - UniversityOfWarwick +alias: + - Nick Land +summary: "Nick Land is an English philosopher who co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, originated the right-accelerationist current that fed into the Dark Enlightenment, and whose CCRU-era writings on capitalism and technology as self-reinforcing feedback loops supplied the metaphysical register that Curtis Yarvin's Neoreaction supplied the institutional register for." +born: 1962-01-17 +location: "England" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Nick Land (born January 17, 1962) is an English philosopher who co-founded the [[CCRU|Cybernetic Culture Research Unit]] at the [[University of Warwick|University of Warwick]] in the mid-1990s and originated the [[Accelerationism|right-accelerationist]] philosophical current that feeds into the [[Dark Enlightenment]] and [[Neoreaction]]. Land's CCRU-era writings argued that techno-capitalism functions as a self-reinforcing positive-feedback loop that should be allowed to dissolve existing political structures without restraint, and his subsequent Dark Enlightenment work extended the argument into the explicit framing of liberal democracy as an obstacle to the necessary acceleration. Land's work supplies the metaphysical and technological register that [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s Neoreaction supplies the institutional and procedural register for, and the two are the co-originators of the Dark Enlightenment.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Warwick Philosophy Department and the CCRU Founding + +Land was appointed to the philosophy department at the University of Warwick in the late 1980s, having completed his doctorate at the [[University of Essex|University of Essex]] on [[Georges Bataille|Georges Bataille]] and the philosophy of excess. His early academic work drew on [[Bataille|Bataille]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]], and [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze]], and his teaching at Warwick acquired a cult following among philosophy students in the early 1990s for its intensity and its departure from the conventional analytic-philosophy curriculum.[^1][^4] + +The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit emerged from Land's Warwick orbit around 1995, co-founded with [[Sadie Plant|Sadie Plant]] (the cyberfeminist theorist) and incorporating the graduate students who would become the CCRU's core, including [[Mark Fisher|Mark Fisher]], [[Kodwo Eshun|Kodwo Eshun]], Sadie Plant, and [[Steve Goodman|Steve Goodman]] (who subsequently operated as the musician [[Kode9|Kode9]]). The CCRU functioned as a research collective outside the normal departmental structure, blending philosophy, science fiction, cybernetics, [[Afrofuturism|Afrofuturism]], and music theory. The unit's self-described practice was "conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources," and its output included academic papers, performative lectures, the [[Virtual Futures|Virtual Futures]] conferences, and a body of hyperstitional texts written as if the fictions they described were real.[^1][^4][^5] + +### The Accelerationist Argument + +Land's CCRU-era argument, developed across the mid-to-late 1990s, held that capitalism and technological change are not instruments to be steered by political will but forces that are themselves doing the steering, and that the human political and institutional apparatus is an obstacle to be dissolved by the acceleration rather than a hand on the tiller. The argument drew on [[Deleuze|Deleuze]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]]'s concept of [[deterritorialization|deterritorialization]], on Bataille's accursed-share economics of excess, and on the cybernetic theory of [[Norbert Wiener|Norbert Wiener]] and [[William S. Burroughs|William S. Burroughs]], to produce the framing that techno-capitalism is an autonomous, self-optimizing process that will dissolve the existing order and that the philosopher's role is to accelerate the dissolution rather than to resist it.[^1][^6] + +The CCRU's [[hyperstition|hyperstition]] practice was the methodological complement. Hyperstition is the production of fictions that make themselves real through the act of propagation, and the CCRU's texts operated as if the cybernetic future they described were already operative. The practice is the philosophical ancestor of the [[Chan ARG Ecosystem|chan-ARG hyperstitional tradition]] (including [[TheGame23]]) and of the broader internet-native narrative-production forms that descend from it.[^4][^5] + +### The Warwick Departure and the Shanghai Relocation + +Land left Warwick around 1998 amid what colleagues and students described as a combination of intellectual exhaustion, amphetamine use, and mental-health crisis. The biographical detail is documented in Mark Fisher's writing and in the retrospective accounts of the CCRU members, and it produced the break between Land's academic-philosophy period and his subsequent post-academic work. Land relocated to [[Shanghai|Shanghai]] in the early 2000s and spent the subsequent years writing independently, absorbing the Chinese techno-capitalist environment directly, and developing the argument that the Chinese model of state-directed capitalism represented the acceleration's most advanced form.[^1][^4] + +The Shanghai relocation marked the transition between the CCRU-era accelerationism (a theoretical-philosophical position developed in the Warwick seminar room) and the subsequent Dark Enlightenment accelerationism (a political position developed in direct contact with the Chinese economic model). Land's Shanghai-period writing extended the acceleration argument into the explicit claim that liberal democracy is the obstacle and that authoritarian-capitalist governance is the acceleration's vehicle.[^1][^2] + +### The Dark Enlightenment and the Yarvin Synthesis + +Land's Dark Enlightenment series, written from 2012 onward, fused the accelerationist metaphysics with the NRx institutional program. The series named the broader current and articulated the shared diagnosis: liberal democracy is failing, the Cathedral ([[The Cathedral|Yarvin's term]] for the institutional consensus-producing apparatus) is the mechanism of the failure, and the role of the philosopher is to maintain the intellectual infrastructure for the post-democratic successor. Land's framing supplied the systematic-philosophical case that democratic governance is in fundamental tension with the trajectory of technological capitalism; Yarvin's framing supplied the institutional proposal (the [[Neocameralism|neocameral]] joint-stock state) for what replaces it.[^2][^7] + +Land cites Yarvin and Yarvin cites Land, and the [[Peter Thiel]] patronage of Yarvin (documented across multiple years) connects the Land-Yarvin intellectual current to the Thiel commercial network through a single funded relationship. Land's own relationship to the Thiel network is less direct than Yarvin's, but the intellectual lineage runs from Land through Yarvin to Thiel through the shared Dark Enlightenment frame.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Land's career, the CCRU, and the Warwick period, see Mark Fisher's writing, the retrospective accounts of the CCRU members, and the Warwick departmental record. +[^2]: Land, Nick. "The Dark Enlightenment" (series), 2012 onward, and the broader Dark Enlightenment writings. +[^3]: "What is Nick Land's Philosophy of Accelerationism Really?" *Aeon.* https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really +[^4]: [[Cybernetic Culture Research Unit|Cybernetic Culture Research Unit]]. See the [[Monoskop|Monoskop]] archive and the Medium retrospective "Forward? A Short History of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit." +[^5]: Carstens, Delphi. "Hyperstition: An Introduction" (interview with Nick Land), *Orphan Drift Archive,* 2009, on the CCRU concept of fictions that make themselves real. https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/ +[^6]: Land's CCRU-era accelerationism is developed across the collected writings of the period; see the CCRU archives. +[^7]: Pein, Corey. "The Moldbug Variations." *The Baffler,* 2014, documenting the Yarvin-Land neoreactionary synthesis and Thiel's investment in Yarvin's Tlon/Urbit venture. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein ; "Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and the Dark Utopia of the New Radical Right." *Reset DOC,* 2022. https://www.resetdoc.org/story/curtis-yarvin-nick-land-black-utopia-of-new-radical-right/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Palmer Luckey.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Palmer Luckey.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2b4dc5d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Palmer Luckey.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - PalmerLuckey + - Anduril + - FoundersFund + - DefenseTech + - Trump +summary: "Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR who, after being pushed out of Facebook in 2017 over a pro-Trump donation, founded the Founders Fund-backed defense contractor Anduril Industries." +born: 1992-09-19 +location: "Orange County, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Palmer Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American technology entrepreneur who founded the virtual-reality company [[Oculus VR]], sold it to [[Facebook]] in 2014, was pushed out of the company in 2017 after a pro-[[Donald Trump|Trump]] political donation became public, and then founded the defense contractor [[Anduril Industries]] with backing from [[Peter Thiel]]'s [[Founders Fund]].[^1][^2] + +### Oculus and the Facebook Exit + +Luckey founded Oculus VR in 2012 and sold it to Facebook in 2014 for about two billion dollars. The Daily Beast revealed on September 22, 2016 that he had donated ten thousand dollars to [[Nimble America]], a pro-Trump group founded by two moderators of the [[r/The_Donald]] forum that produced anti-[[Hillary Clinton|Clinton]] internet memes, and that he had posted in support of it under the handle "NimbleRichMan." Luckey acknowledged the donation, saying he had "plenty of money" and that it "sounded like a real jolly good time," and the disclosure prompted a backlash inside the technology industry that saw him removed from public appearances and frozen out of Oculus decisions.[^2][^3][^5] + +Luckey left Facebook in March 2017. He later said he had been fired "for no reason at all" and tied it to the donation, and leaked internal emails reported by the Wall Street Journal indicated that [[Mark Zuckerberg]] had personally pressured him to publicly endorse the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson rather than Trump. Facebook maintained the departure was unrelated to his politics; when Senator [[Ted Cruz]] later asked Zuckerberg in Senate testimony why Luckey had been fired, Zuckerberg declined to answer. Reporting put a settlement at around 100 million dollars, a figure neither party confirmed.[^2][^6] + +### Anduril Industries + +Luckey founded Anduril Industries in April 2017 with [[Trae Stephens]] of Founders Fund, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, three of them [[Palantir Technologies]] alumni, building autonomous-surveillance and weapons systems for the U.S. military and border-security agencies. The company's products are coordinated by an artificial-intelligence command-and-control software layer called Lattice and include the Ghost reconnaissance drone, the Anvil counter-drone interceptor, the reusable Roadrunner air-defense interceptor, the Barracuda cruise-missile family, the Dive-LD undersea vehicle, and the autonomous Sentry surveillance towers deployed along the U.S. border. Luckey also donated one hundred thousand dollars to Trump's 2017 inauguration committee through a shell company called Wings of Time, and he remained a prominent technology-industry supporter of Trump and the defense-tech turn promoted across the Thiel network.[^1][^4] + +Founders Fund was the first institutional backer and continued to anchor later rounds, leading a 1.5 billion dollar Series F in August 2024 at a 14 billion dollar valuation and a 2.5 billion dollar Series G in June 2025 at a 30.5 billion dollar valuation, with a one billion dollar check that the firm described as its largest ever. In February 2025 Anduril took over the U.S. Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System program from [[Microsoft]], a headset effort valued at up to 22 billion dollars over ten years, and in 2025 won a 363 million dollar Customs and Border Protection contract for more than 200 Sentry towers. In 2025 Luckey and [[Joe Lonsdale|Joseph Lonsdale]] also cofounded Erebor, a digital-first national bank backed by Founders Fund and aimed at crypto, AI, and defense companies, which received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in October 2025.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Palmer Luckey: From Oculus Founder to Anduril Defense Tech Leader," Built In, on the Oculus sale, the Facebook exit, and the Anduril founding. https://builtin.com/articles/who-is-palmer-luckey +[^2]: "Palmer Luckey says his Facebook firing changed the way he does business," 2024, on the 2017 departure and his account of it. https://www.aol.com/palmer-luckey-says-facebook-firing-204406748.html +[^3]: "Palmer Luckey just gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group dedicated to 'shitposting' and meme magic," *TechCrunch,* September 23, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/23/palmer-luckey-nimble-america +[^4]: "Oculus founder has new border surveillance startup," *Axios,* December 15, 2017. https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/oculus-founder-has-new-border-surveillance-startup-1513302749 +[^5]: Collins, Ben, and Gideon Resnick. "Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump's Meme Machine," *The Daily Beast,* September 22, 2016, on Nimble America, the r/The_Donald founders, and the "NimbleRichMan" posts. https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-near-billionaire-secretly-funding-trumps-meme-machine +[^6]: "Palmer Luckey claims he was fired from Facebook for his politics," *CNBC,* May 22, 2019, on the firing, the reported Zuckerberg pressure to back Gary Johnson, and the Cruz exchange. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/palmer-luckey-claims-he-was-fired-from-facebook-for-his-politics.html +[^7]: "Anduril raises $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation," *TechCrunch,* June 5, 2025, on the Series G and the Founders Fund check; and "Anduril raises $1.5B Series F," *Axios,* August 8, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/anduril-raises-2-5b-doubling-valuation-to-30-5b/ +[^8]: "Anduril takes over Army's IVAS program from Microsoft," *Breaking Defense,* February 11, 2025; and "OCC grants conditional approval to Erebor Bank," *CoinDesk,* October 15, 2025, on the Luckey and Lonsdale bank. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/02/anduril-microsoft-ivas/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Reid Hoffman.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Reid Hoffman.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a319e221 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Reid Hoffman.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - ReidHoffman + - PayPalMafia + - LinkedIn + - Greylock + - JeffreyEpstein + - Dialog + - Microsoft +alias: + - Reid Garrett Hoffman +summary: "Reid Hoffman is an American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a PayPal Mafia principal as cofounder and executive vice president of PayPal, the cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a Greylock general partner, a 2026 Dialog retreat registrant, and a 2015 Epstein dinner attendee who publicly apologized in 2019 for helping repair Jeffrey Epstein's post-conviction image." +born: 1967-08-05 +location: "Stanford, California (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Reid Hoffman (born August 5, 1967, in [[Stanford, California|Stanford]], [[California]]) is an American venture capitalist and entrepreneur who served as executive vice president and a founding board member of [[PayPal]], cofounded and served as executive chairman of [[LinkedIn]], and joined [[Greylock Partners|Greylock]] as a general partner in 2009. Hoffman is a [[PayPal Mafia]] principal, a 2026 [[Dialog]] retreat registrant per the leaked *WIRED* roster, and a documented attendee at the 2015 Jeffrey Epstein dinner whose guest list also included [[Peter Thiel]], [[Mark Zuckerberg]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Joi Ito]], and Epstein himself. Hoffman publicly apologized in September 2019 for his role in helping repair Epstein's post-conviction public image.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The PayPal and LinkedIn Trajectory + +Hoffman joined PayPal in its founding period as executive vice president of external relations, serving on the board and managing the company's external positioning through the 2002 sale to [[eBay]]. His role placed him among the PayPal Mafia cohort (alongside Peter Thiel, [[Max Levchin]], Elon Musk, [[David Sacks]], [[Ken Howery]], [[Luke Nosek]], [[Roelof Botha]], and [[Keith Rabois]]) whose subsequent ventures shaped the post-PayPal Silicon Valley generation. Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002 (before the eBay sale closed) and built it into the dominant professional-networking platform, taking it public in 2011 and selling it to [[Microsoft]] in 2016 for 26.2 billion dollars.[^1] + +The Microsoft acquisition and Hoffman's subsequent board seat at Microsoft placed him inside the enterprise-software and cloud-infrastructure orbit adjacent to the Thiel commercial network. Hoffman joined Greylock as a general partner in 2009, and his Greylock portfolio overlaps with the broader Silicon Valley venture ecosystem that the [[Founders Fund]] and the Thiel network operate within.[^1] + +### The Epstein Relationship and the 2019 Apology + +*Axios* reported on September 12, 2019 that Hoffman had emailed the outlet to apologize for his role in helping repair [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]]'s post-conviction public image. The apology covered Hoffman's 2015 interactions with Epstein, including introductions Hoffman facilitated related to Epstein's attempts at image rehabilitation and to the MIT donations Epstein was arranging through Joi Ito at the [[MIT Media Lab]]. The *Wall Street Journal* reported in 2023, on the basis of the [[Epstein Files|Epstein calendars]], that Hoffman visited Epstein's private island.[^2][^3][^4] + +The August 2015 dinner that Hoffman hosted in [[Palo Alto]], ostensibly to raise money for the MIT Media Lab (documented in the Epstein Files Transparency Act releases, EFTA00344556 and EFTA00344564), placed him at the same table as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Joi Ito, and Epstein. Hoffman apologized in September 2019 for his role in the Epstein image-rehabilitation effort. No Epstein victim has made a public allegation against Hoffman.[^2][^3][^5] + +### The Dialog Registration + +Hoffman appears on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, per *WIRED*'s reporting on the leak. Dialog, cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and [[Auren Hoffman]], convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Hoffman's presence on the roster places a sitting Greylock general partner and a former Microsoft board member inside the same convening network whose 2026 registrants included [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]], [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]], [[Jared Polis|Governor Jared Polis]], and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe [[Alexus Grynkewich|General Alexus Grynkewich]].[^1] + +Hoffman's politics diverge from the Thiel network's Republican alignment. Hoffman has been a prominent [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] donor and operative, supporting [[Joe Biden]] and [[Kamala Harris]] and publicly opposing [[Donald Trump]]. He appears on the roster alongside both Democratic and Republican elected officials.[^1] + +### The Musk Clash and the Epstein-Files Politics + +Musk and Hoffman clashed publicly over their respective Epstein ties in 2025-2026. The [[Anadolu Agency|Anadolu Agency]] reported on the online exchange on [[X (social media)|X]], in which each accused the other of the closer Epstein relationship. Musk, whose 2015 Epstein dinner attendance is documented in the Epstein file releases (EFTA00344556), pointed to Hoffman's apology for the image-rehabilitation work. Hoffman, whose apology is documented in the September 2019 [[Axios|Axios]] exclusive, pointed to the broader pattern of Musk's Epstein contacts.[^6] + +Hoffman subsequently posted on LinkedIn calling for the full release of the Epstein files and pledging to advocate for victim justice. The public clash is part of the broader political dynamics around the 2025-2026 file releases, in which multiple Silicon Valley principals whose Epstein relationships have been documented have positioned themselves on the question of disclosure. [[ABC News|ABC News]] reported that Hoffman's ties to Epstein face a Trump-ordered investigation, though no Epstein victim has made a public allegation against Hoffman.[^5][^6] + +Hoffman has funded Democratic candidates and opposed Trump, while Musk moved to Republican alignment across 2022 to 2024. Both appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations." *Axios,* September 12, 2019. https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations +[^3]: "LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Apologizes for Helping Jeffrey Epstein." *Business Insider,* September 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman-apologizes-helping-jeffrey-epstein-2019-9 +[^4]: For the Hoffman visit to the Epstein island, see the *Wall Street Journal* 2023 reporting on the Epstein calendars and the SEC shareholder-proposal filing referencing the visit. +[^5]: "LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman's ties to Jeffrey Epstein face Trump-ordered investigation." *ABC News,* 2025. https://abcnews.com/US/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffmans-ties-jeffrey-epstein-face/story?id=127651719 +[^6]: "2 tech billionaires clash online about ties to Jeffrey Epstein." *Anadolu Agency,* 2025. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/2-tech-billionaires-clash-online-about-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein/3820174 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Richard Lynn.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Richard Lynn.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..28d12a97 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Richard Lynn.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - RaceScience + - Eugenics + - PioneerFund + - HumanBiodiversity + - Psychology +alias: + - Richard Lynn +summary: "Richard Lynn was a British psychologist who promoted hereditarian claims about racial and national differences in intelligence and 'dysgenics,' ran the Pioneer Fund and the Ulster Institute for Social Research, and whose national-IQ data was repudiated as fundamentally flawed." +born: 1930-02-20 +died: 2023-07-23 +location: "Bristol, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Richard Lynn (1930-2023) was a British psychologist who spent the latter part of his career arguing that races and nations differ in average intelligence for genetic reasons and that modern populations are undergoing "dysgenic" decline. He edited the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]], founded and led the [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]], served as president of the [[Pioneer Fund]] after 2012, and assembled the "national IQ" datasets that other researchers later condemned as methodologically unsound. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classified him as a promoter of scientific racism, and he described himself as a "scientific racist."[^1][^2] + +### Career + +Lynn was educated at the [[University of Cambridge]] and held posts at the [[University of Exeter]] and in Dublin before becoming professor of psychology at the [[University of Ulster]] from 1972 to 1995. He founded the Ulster Institute for Social Research and became editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, the [[Wickliffe Draper|Draper]]-funded race-science journal. In 2018 Ulster University stripped him of his emeritus professor title after concluding that he had advanced views that were "racist and sexist in nature."[^1][^3] + +Born in 1930 and educated at Bristol Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, Lynn built a four-decade collaboration with the personality psychologist [[Hans Eysenck]] on racial and national differences in intelligence. During his Ulster tenure amid the [[The Troubles|Troubles]] he attributed Ireland's purportedly low average IQ to "selective emigration of the brightest" and a "dysgenic effect of Roman Catholicism," a claim later contradicted by Catholic pupils outperforming Protestant pupils on Northern Ireland GCSE exams. The 2018 stripping of his title followed a student campaign at Ulster, and he published a self-justifying memoir, *Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist*, through his own Ulster Institute imprint.[^7][^8] + +### Race, Dysgenics, and National IQ + +Lynn's books included *Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations* (1996), *Eugenics: A Reassessment* (2001), *IQ and the Wealth of Nations* (2002, with the Finnish political scientist [[Tatu Vanhanen]]), and *The Global Bell Curve* (2008). He argued that average IQ differs by race and nation, that sub-Saharan African populations have very low average intelligence, and that welfare and immigration drive a hereditary decline in the gene pool. Mainstream researchers rejected these claims. The psychologist [[Jelte Wicherts]] and colleagues showed that Lynn had reached his low African IQ estimates by selectively excluding studies, and that a systematic reading of the data produced substantially higher figures. In 2020 the [[European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association]] formally warned against using Lynn's national-IQ dataset, concluding that any analysis relying on it was "unsound."[^2][^4] + +*IQ and the Wealth of Nations* asserted that national average IQ correlated with gross domestic product per capita and assigned numbers as low as the high 60s to several African states, figures that critics traced to a handful of unrepresentative test administrations. Lynn also published *Sex Differences in Intelligence* (2017), claiming that adult men have higher average IQ than women, a thesis that critics rejected as resting on outdated head-size measurements and selective sampling. Psychometricians noted that the [[Flynn effect]], the steady rise in raw IQ scores across the twentieth century documented by the psychologist [[James Flynn]], undercut Lynn's claim that measured group gaps reflected fixed genetic endowments, since environmental change alone moved scores by amounts comparable to the gaps Lynn called innate.[^2][^10] + +### Pioneer Fund and the Race-Science Network + +Lynn received Pioneer Fund money over many years, and on the death of the psychologist [[J. Philippe Rushton]] in 2012 he became the fund's president. His Ulster Institute publishes Mankind Quarterly, and his contributors and associates overlapped with those of the secret [[London Conference on Intelligence]] held at [[University College London]] from 2014 to 2017, including [[Emil Kirkegaard]], who ran the non-peer-reviewed [[OpenPsych]] repository. His hereditarian framework belongs to the literature popularized by [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and circulated through the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] current associated with [[Steve Sailer]], and his "national IQ" figures were widely reproduced in the [[Neoreaction|neoreactionary]] and [[Curtis Yarvin|Yarvin]]-adjacent online right.[^2][^5] + +Lynn's stated aims went beyond research into explicit advocacy. Reviewing [[Raymond Cattell]]'s 1972 tract *A New Morality from Science: Beyondism* in 1974, he wrote that "what is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples." In *Eugenics: A Reassessment* (2001) he argued that the postwar condemnation of eugenics had gone too far and that selective breeding and biotechnology should be used to raise intelligence and reduce genetic disease. The Southern Poverty Law Center quoted these passages in classifying him as among the most unapologetic of self-described scientific racists.[^9] + +### Repudiation + +In June 2024 a group of seven scientists, writing in *STAT*, called on Elsevier, Springer, and other publishers to retract Lynn's national-IQ articles, citing his methodological flaws, his "explicitly racist agenda," and his history of academic malpractice. The campaign followed years of failed replications and the rejection of his work across mainstream psychology and genetics.[^4][^6] + +The retraction authors, including the evolutionary biologist [[Kevin Bird]] and the population geneticist [[Jedidiah Carlson]], catalogued the data underpinning Lynn's national-IQ figures. They reported that his estimate for Angola, a country of some 35 million, rested on a test of 19 people; the Dominican Republic figure came from 34 individuals, Greenland from 40, Uzbekistan from 51, and Botswana from 140 adolescents who may not have been citizens. Lynn published no selection criteria, and he excluded a higher-scoring African sample while keeping several low-scoring studies that lacked basic age data. The authors directed their requests at the Elsevier journals *Intelligence* and *Personality and Individual Differences* and at Springer's *Evolutionary Psychological Science*, reporting that editors had declined to act or had not responded.[^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "UU students call for removal of former professor's title," *The Irish News,* February 14, 2018, on Lynn's Ulster career and the title controversy. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/02/14/news/uu-students-calls-for-removal-of-former-professor-s-title-1255299/ +[^2]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on Lynn's national-IQ work, the Ulster Institute, Mankind Quarterly, and the scientific repudiation. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/ +[^3]: "Prof who lost emeritus status for views on race and intelligence has paper flagged," Retraction Watch, August 8, 2019, on the 2018 stripping of his title. https://retractionwatch.com/2019/08/08/prof-who-lost-emeritus-status-for-views-on-race-and-intelligence-has-paper-flagged/ +[^4]: "Another failure to replicate Lynn's estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans," Jelte Wicherts et al., *Intelligence,* 2010, on the selective-data critique of Lynn's African IQ figures. https://jeltewicherts.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/wichertsravenafr2010rej.pdf +[^5]: "Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed," Southern Poverty Law Center, on Rushton's resignation and Lynn's succession as Pioneer Fund president. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/pioneer-fund-assets-divided-new-leadership-appointed/ +[^6]: "Journals that published Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles should retract them," Center for Genetics and Society, June 2024, listing the seven authors (Dan Samorodnitsky, Kevin Bird, Jedidiah Carlson, James Lingford, Jon Phillips, Rebecca Sear, Cathryn Townsend) and the journals targeted; sample-size figures from the accompanying *STAT* article. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/journals-published-richard-lynns-racist-research-articles-should-retract-them +[^7]: "Hans Eysenck," and Lynn, Richard, "Reminiscences of forty years of friendship with Hans Eysenck," on the Cambridge education and the Eysenck collaboration; "Richard Lynn and The Myth of Low Irish IQ," on the Catholicism and GCSE claims. https://medium.com/@leonaburime/the-myth-of-low-irish-iq-how-richard-lynn-built-a-house-of-cards-41ce353a8656 +[^8]: "UU students call for removal of former professor's title," *The Irish News,* February 14, 2018, on the Ulster student campaign; Lynn, Richard. *Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist.* Ulster Institute for Social Research. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/02/14/news/uu-students-calls-for-removal-of-former-professor-s-title-1255299/ +[^9]: "Richard Lynn," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, quoting his 1974 review of Cattell's *Beyondism* with the "phasing out of such peoples" passage and his eugenics advocacy. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/richard-lynn/ +[^10]: "Race and gender in methodologically flawed work of Richard Lynn," on *IQ and the Wealth of Nations,* *Sex Differences in Intelligence,* and the critique of his head-size and sampling methods; Flynn, James R., on the secular rise in IQ scores known as the Flynn effect. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338044465_Race_and_gender_in_methodologically_flawed_work_of_Richard_Lynn diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Robert Maxwell.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Robert Maxwell.md index 7892531d..6bff41cb 100644 --- a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Robert Maxwell.md +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Robert Maxwell.md @@ -1,73 +1,111 @@ --- -title: Robert Maxwell -aliases: - - Robert Maxwell - - Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch - - Ian Maxwell -created: 2024-04-25 -updated: 2026-05-17 category: "Intelligence & Government" tags: - Person - - PROMIS - - CIA + - RobertMaxwell - Mossad + - MI6 + - KGB + - PROMIS - Israel - Soviet - - Politician + - MirrorGroup - Media - - UK - - BCCI -summary: "Robert Maxwell was a British media proprietor, Labour MP, and alleged simultaneous asset for Mossad, MI6, and the KGB whose alleged role as the primary international distributor of backdoored PROMIS software to foreign governments became central to the INSLAW scandal narrative; he was found dead in the Atlantic Ocean on November 5, 1991, three months after Danny Casolaro's death." -born: 1923-01-10 + - PensionFraud + - JeffreyEpstein +alias: + - Robert Maxwell + - Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch + - Jan Ludvik Hoch + - Ian Robert Maxwell +summary: "Robert Maxwell was a British publishing magnate, Labour MP, and alleged simultaneous asset of Mossad, British, and Soviet intelligence whose empire collapsed after he looted the Mirror Group pension funds, who was alleged to be the international distributor of backdoored PROMIS software, and who died at sea off the Canary Islands in 1991 amid contested allegations of foul play." +born: 1923-06-10 died: 1991-11-05 location: "London, United Kingdom" +created: 2024-04-25 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch on January 10, 1923, in Slatinské Doly, [[Czechoslovakia]] (now Solotvyno, [[Ukraine]]), the son of a poor Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. His parents and most of his siblings were killed in the Holocaust. He fled through Romania and France, eventually joining the Czech Army in exile in the [[United Kingdom]], then serving in the British Army, where he was awarded the Military Cross by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. He died on November 5, 1991, under disputed circumstances in the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands. He was 68.[^3] -### Media and Business Career +Robert Maxwell was a British publishing magnate, Member of Parliament, and proprietor of [[Mirror Group Newspapers]] who built and lost a sprawling media and finance empire before drowning off his yacht near the [[Canary Islands]] in 1991. He was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch on June 10, 1923, in Slatinské Doly, Carpathian Ruthenia, then part of Czechoslovakia and now Solotvyno, [[Ukraine]].[^1] After his death, investigators found he had misappropriated hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds, and journalists and a self-described former Israeli intelligence officer alleged he had served Israeli, British, and Soviet intelligence services.[^2] -After the war, Maxwell worked in [[British intelligence]] in occupied Berlin, operating under cover as an interpreter. He built a business relationship with the German scientific publishing house [[Springer Verlag]] and in 1948 founded Pergamon Press, which became a major international scientific publisher. He was elected to Parliament as the Labour MP for Buckinghamshire East in 1964 but lost his seat in 1970. A 1971 Board of Trade investigation into his management of Pergamon concluded that Maxwell was "not a suitable person to be at the helm of a publicly quoted company" - a finding that damaged his reputation for the following decade but that he recovered from through continuing commercial activity.[^3] +### Origins and War Service -Maxwell acquired [[Mirror Group]] Newspapers in 1984, becoming proprietor of the *[[Daily Mirror]]*, and purchased the American publisher [[Macmillan]] in 1988. By the late 1980s his media empire encompassed dozens of companies across multiple countries. After his death, investigators discovered that he had looted approximately £750 million from the pension funds of his companies, affecting approximately 32,000 pensioners. His sons [[Ian Maxwell|Ian]] and [[Kevin Maxwell]] were arrested in connection with the pension fraud; both were ultimately acquitted in 1996 after a lengthy trial.[^3] +Maxwell came from a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in the Carpathian region. His father was Mehel (Mechel) Hoch and his mother Hannah Slomowitz, and Maxwell was one of seven or more children.[^14] After Hungary occupied the region and Nazi Germany took control in 1944, his parents, his grandfather, and three of his siblings were deported to [[Auschwitz]] and murdered there; only Maxwell and two sisters survived the [[Holocaust]].[^14] One sister, Sylvia, was reportedly pulled from a deportation transport in [[Budapest]] by the Swedish diplomat [[Raoul Wallenberg]], who issued her protective papers.[^14] Maxwell himself had left the region in 1939, around age fifteen or sixteen, before the deportations.[^14] -### Intelligence Connections +He fled westward after the German occupation, joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in May 1940, and transferred to the British Army, where he rose from private to sergeant before being commissioned.[^1] He served across North West Europe from the [[Normandy]] landings onward, was commissioned into the [[Queen's Royal Regiment]] in January 1945, and on January 29, 1945, while leading his platoon toward Paarlo in the [[Netherlands]], captured a German machine-gun position; for that action he was awarded the [[Military Cross]] and promoted to captain.[^15] Field Marshal [[Bernard Montgomery]] pinned the decoration on him.[^15] In 1945 he married the Frenchwoman Élisabeth Meynard, with whom he had nine children.[^14] -Maxwell maintained simultaneous intelligence relationships with multiple services for decades. His [[Mossad]] connections began in the early 1960s through a meeting arranged with [[Yitzhak Shamir]], then running Mossad operations in Europe, facilitated by [[Aviezer Ya'ari]] of the Israeli [[Mapam Party]]. Maxwell and Shamir became close associates, and Maxwell developed an antipathy toward American predominance in intelligence sharing that aligned with [[Israel|Israeli]] interests. His contacts with Soviet intelligence dated to his wartime and immediate postwar service in Germany; he reportedly provided useful intelligence to the [[KGB]] in parallel with his Mossad relationship, a dual role that both services are described as tolerating because each found him useful.[^1][^3] +He became a naturalized British subject on June 19, 1946, and legally changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell on June 30, 1948.[^1] During the immediate postwar period he served in the Berlin Information Control Unit of the British occupation authorities, and in 1947 he made contact with [[Ferdinand Springer]] of [[Springer-Verlag]], Germany's leading prewar scientific publisher, who had retained large stocks of valuable journal back numbers.[^16] Maxwell agreed to act as Springer's distributor outside Germany through his new British firm, the European Periodicals, Publicity and Advertising Corporation (EPPAC), and in 1949 helped form a joint distribution company, Lange, Maxwell & Springer, in which the Springer interests held a 49 percent stake.[^16] -### Role in PROMIS Distribution +### Czechoslovak Arms to Israel -Multiple sources allege that Maxwell served as the primary commercial agent through which a surveillance-modified version of [[PROMIS]] software was distributed internationally following [[Rafael Eitan]]'s [[LAKAM]] operation to obtain and modify the software. According to Gordon Thomas's account in *Gideon's Spies* (1999), drawing on Israeli intelligence sources, Maxwell agreed to market PROMIS for U.S. and Israeli intelligence using his network of companies, aware of the software's general intelligence-gathering capabilities. He received a flat fee of $8 million and a percentage of gross revenues generated through his distribution network. He operated without necessarily knowing the specific technical details of the surveillance trapdoor embedded in the software.[^1][^3] +Maxwell has been described in several accounts as having used his contacts among the Czechoslovak Communist leadership to help arrange the supply of arms to the [[Jewish Agency]] and the emerging state of [[Israel]] during the 1947-1949 period, when an international embargo otherwise restricted weapons reaching the Zionist forces.[^17] The clandestine Czechoslovak sales, authorized by foreign minister [[Jan Masaryk]] and beginning with a contract in January 1948, delivered rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and Avia S-199 fighter aircraft to the [[Haganah]], and [[Yitzhak Rabin]] later said that without the Czech arms it was doubtful the war could have been won.[^17] -Maxwell's principal vehicle for PROMIS distribution was [[Degem]], an Israeli-controlled computer company with operations in Israel, Guatemala, and Transkei. His Berlitz language schools and other international holdings provided additional cover for technology sales in countries where direct Israeli involvement would have been problematic. Among the alleged recipients of PROMIS-derived software distributed through Maxwell's network were agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Jordan, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Nicaragua. In 1985, an abridged version was allegedly sold to [[Credit Suisse]], providing intelligence access to Israeli accounts held there. In the late 1980s, Maxwell allegedly sold PROMIS to the [[Soviet Union]], with the transaction facilitated by the lifting of [[IBM]] export restrictions - an arrangement that reportedly allowed Degem technicians to install the trapdoor-equipped software on IBM computers delivered to Soviet intelligence.[^1][^3] +The specifics of Maxwell's personal role rest largely on later biographical and journalistic accounts rather than contemporaneous documentation, and the principal sources, including the writers John Loftus and Mark Aarons and the author [[Gordon Thomas]], place him as a facilitator and shipper of materiel and aircraft parts rather than a signatory to the state-level contracts.[^17][^9] No declassified Czechoslovak or Israeli record has been published that fixes the precise scope of his involvement, and the claim is therefore reported but not independently confirmed.[^17] His Eastern European Communist contacts from this period, together with the trading relationships his publishing businesses later built across the [[Eastern Bloc]], formed part of the basis on which writers afterward speculated about ties to Soviet and Israeli services.[^2] -[[INSLAW]] alleged that Maxwell contributed $600,000 from a joint U.S.-Israeli intelligence slush fund to secure the dismissal of [[Leigh Ratiner]], INSLAW's lead litigation counsel at Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, after Maxwell learned that Ratiner's aggressive litigation strategy threatened to expose the international PROMIS distribution network. The dismissal occurred following a meeting between Dickstein partner [[Leonard Garment]] and Deputy Attorney General [[Arnold Burns]]; Ratiner later settled a wrongful dismissal suit against his firm for the same amount. The [[Nicholas J. Bua|Bua Report]] found no credible evidence supporting this allegation.[^2] +### Pergamon Press and Mirror Group -The intelligence community's involvement in Maxwell's PROMIS business also surfaces in accounts involving former Senator [[John Tower]], a friend of Maxwell who was close to the [[George H.W. Bush]] administration. In 1984, Tower allegedly approached Maxwell on behalf of a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]-connected group to formalize his role as the PROMIS marketing intermediary.[^1] +Maxwell founded [[Pergamon Press]] in 1951, buying three-quarters of the science publisher Butterworth-Springer, and built it into a major international scientific and academic publishing house issuing journals across the sciences.[^1] In 1969 the American financier [[Saul Steinberg]] of [[Leasco]] launched a takeover bid for Pergamon that collapsed amid a dispute over the profitability of an encyclopedia-publishing subsidiary, and Maxwell lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from its board in October 1969 before reacquiring the company in 1974.[^1] A [[Department of Trade and Industry]] inspectors' inquiry into the Leasco affair concluded in 1971 with the finding that, "notwithstanding Mr Maxwell's acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company."[^1] -In 1987, an alleged contribution to the West Australian Labor Party reportedly passed through one of Maxwell's Australian companies and was deposited by the Pergamon Press Trust Fund in Moscow, with [[Richard Babayan]] and [[Earl Brian]] acting on behalf of [[Hadron]] in facilitating the transaction.[^1] +He sat as the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] [[Member of Parliament]] for [[Buckingham]] from 1964 to 1970.[^1] In July 1984 he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of the [[Daily Mirror]] and other titles, for about 113 million pounds from [[Reed International]].[^1] He expanded into the United States, completing a tender offer of about 2.6 billion dollars for the publisher [[Macmillan]] in November 1988, acquiring the language-school chain [[Berlitz]] and [[Official Airline Guides]], and buying the [[New York Daily News]] in 1991, financing the acquisitions through an increasingly opaque web of public companies and private trusts that left his group heavily indebted.[^3][^18] -### Death +### Collapse and the Pension Theft -Maxwell was last heard from by crew aboard his yacht, the *Lady Ghislaine*, at approximately 4:25 a.m. on November 5, 1991, while the vessel was cruising off the Canary Islands. His absence was not discovered until midday, when the yacht's captain, [[Gus Rankin]], could not reach him by telephone. A search of the vessel found nothing. A Spanish Air Force pilot on an aerial search spotted Maxwell's body floating naked in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 20 miles southwest of Gran Canaria and he was recovered by helicopter and transported to a forensic institute in Las Palmas.[^6] +By 1991 Maxwell's empire was carrying unsustainable debt, and he was secretly transferring assets among his public companies, [[Maxwell Communication Corporation]] and Mirror Group Newspapers, and his private interests to prop up share prices and service borrowing.[^3] The pension assets of the various Maxwell schemes, covering more than 32,000 members, were largely pooled in a Common Investment Fund managed by a Maxwell-controlled subsidiary, [[Bishopsgate Investment Management]] (BIM), and Maxwell used those assets as collateral for loans to his private companies, pledging pension-fund securities to banks and transferring them to private Maxwell entities for little or no consideration.[^19] -The Spanish judicial investigation under Judge Isabel Oliva concluded on December 13, 1991. Three pathologists who examined Maxwell could not agree on a single cause: one concluded heart attack alone; a second concluded heart attack followed by drowning; a third concluded fall and drowning without a prior cardiac event. Judge Oliva ruled the probable cause of death was "the association of a double mechanism consisting of a previous causal factor of an ischemic heart attack, followed by a concomitant factor of drowning." The ruling was accidental death. No external signs of violence, no toxicological evidence of poisoning, and no traumatic injury causing loss of consciousness were found. Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.[^6] +After his death, administrators and the [[Serious Fraud Office]] concluded that roughly 450 to 460 million pounds had been taken from the group's pension funds.[^4][^19] [[Goldman Sachs]], acting on Maxwell's instructions, sold blocks of Mirror Group shares that had been marked as pension-fund property, and BIM went into liquidation in March 1992, with many Mirror Group pensioners facing sharp reductions until a partial rescue was arranged.[^19] A long Department of Trade and Industry inspectors' report published in 2001 catalogued the abuses and criticized City advisers, trustees, and the auditors [[Coopers & Lybrand]] Deloitte; the eventual recovery came through out-of-court settlements, including a March 1995 settlement of about 276 million pounds to the pension schemes.[^20] -Maxwell died 87 days after journalist [[Danny Casolaro]], whose "[[The Octopus]]" investigation had specifically encompassed the PROMIS distribution network and Maxwell's alleged role within it. The proximity of the two deaths was noted by INSLAW and congressional investigators.[^2] +His sons [[Kevin Maxwell]] and [[Ian Maxwell]], the latter a BIM director who had signed pension-fund share transfers to the private Maxwell Group, were prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office and tried at the [[Old Bailey]]; in January 1996, after a trial lasting roughly eight months, a jury acquitted both brothers of conspiracy to defraud the pension funds, and in September 1996 prosecutors decided not to pursue a second trial against Kevin Maxwell.[^5][^19] His daughter [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] later moved to the United States and was convicted in 2021 on federal sex-trafficking charges connected to [[Jeffrey Epstein]].[^6] + +### Death off the Lady Ghislaine + +Maxwell disappeared from his motor yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, during a cruise off the Canary Islands and was found dead in the Atlantic on November 5, 1991, his body recovered about 20 miles southwest of [[Gran Canaria]] and taken to [[Las Palmas]] for examination.[^7] In the hours before his disappearance he had reportedly been under acute pressure, including an argument by telephone with his son Kevin over loan defaults, and the last contact with crew was logged in the early hours of November 5.[^21] An autopsy noted heart and lung disease and a graze on his left shoulder, with no other significant wounds.[^7][^21] + +Three pathologists examining the body reached differing conclusions, one favoring a heart attack alone, another a heart attack followed by drowning, and a third a fall and drowning.[^21] A Spanish judicial proceeding under Judge Isabel Oliva of the Granadilla district court closed the case as most probably accidental, attributing death to "the association of a double mechanism consisting of a previous causal factor of an ischemic heart attack, followed by a concomitant factor of drowning," and a separate inquest in [[England]] in December 1991 likewise returned a verdict of death by heart attack combined with accidental drowning.[^21][^7] The circumstances remained disputed, with competing theories of accident, suicide given the impending exposure of his frauds, and foul play.[^7] + +### Intelligence Allegations + +Allegations that Maxwell worked for Israeli intelligence were aired publicly in October 1991, shortly before his death, when [[Seymour Hersh]] discussed his book [[The Samson Option]] at a London press conference, asserting that Maxwell and his Daily Mirror foreign editor [[Nicholas Davies]] had links to Israeli intelligence and that Davies was involved in Israeli arms dealing.[^8] Hersh further alleged that Maxwell had relayed information to the Israeli embassy in London that led to the capture of the nuclear whistleblower [[Mordechai Vanunu]], a claim Maxwell denounced as a total invention.[^8] Labour MP [[George Galloway]] and Conservative MP [[Rupert Allason]] raised the espionage claims in the [[House of Commons]] under parliamentary privilege on October 21, 1991, and Maxwell sued Hersh and his British publisher for libel; after Maxwell's death the action lapsed, and the Mirror Group later apologized to Hersh and paid damages.[^8] + +The most detailed espionage account came from [[Ari Ben-Menashe]], a self-described former employee of the Israeli [[Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel)|Military Intelligence Directorate]], who claimed in his 1992 book [[Profits of War]] that Maxwell and Davies were long-time [[Mossad]] assets, and that Davies had tipped him to Vanunu's 1986 approach to the [[Sunday Mirror]] over the photographs Vanunu had taken at [[Dimona]], introducing him to Vanunu's intermediary [[Oscar Guerrero]]; Vanunu was subsequently lured from London to [[Rome]], seized by Israeli operatives, and convicted in Israel.[^10][^22] His maternal relationship to the prime minister's office began, by his own account, through a meeting arranged with [[Yitzhak Shamir]] in the early 1960s.[^10] + +The Welsh author Gordon Thomas, in [[Gideon's Spies]] (1999) and the later book Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy (2002), drew partly on Ben-Menashe and on the Israeli operative [[Rafi Eitan]] to allege that Maxwell helped distribute a version of the [[PROMIS]] case-management software that Israeli technicians had fitted with a hidden "trapdoor," enabling Israel to monitor the foreign agencies that bought it, marketing it through the Tel Aviv firm [[Degem Computers]].[^9][^23] In these accounts Maxwell received a flat fee of about 8 million dollars plus a percentage of revenues, and the agencies said to have received the software through his network included those of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Jordan, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Nicaragua, with an abridged version said to have been sold to [[Credit Suisse]] in 1985 and a Soviet sale in the late 1980s facilitated by the lifting of [[IBM]] export restrictions.[^10][^9] INSLAW separately alleged that Maxwell contributed 600,000 dollars from a joint U.S.-Israeli intelligence slush fund to secure the removal of its lead litigation counsel [[Leigh Ratiner]], and that the former senator [[John Tower]] had approached Maxwell in 1984 on behalf of a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]-connected group to formalize his role as the PROMIS marketing intermediary; the [[Nicholas J. Bua|Bua Report]] found no credible evidence for these claims.[^10][^25] + +Ben-Menashe's reliability has been repeatedly questioned, including by a 1993 congressional task force, and no declassified record has substantiated the PROMIS-distribution or recruitment allegations; an Israeli prime minister's spokesman dismissed Thomas's claims as "unmitigated drivel."[^9][^11] Maxwell was also long rumored to have had contacts with British intelligence and, given his Eastern European origins and trading ties, with the Soviet [[KGB]], though these characterizations rest on journalistic sourcing rather than disclosed files, and no archive of any of the three services has been released that confirms a formal agent relationship.[^2][^9] ### Murder Allegations -Two former Israeli intelligence sources made public allegations that Maxwell was murdered on Mossad orders. Former Mossad case officer [[Victor Ostrovsky]], in his 1994 memoir *The Other Side of Deception*, wrote that Maxwell had become a liability to Mossad after his financial empire began collapsing under the weight of debt. Maxwell allegedly threatened to expose Mossad operations unless the agency bailed him out financially. Ostrovsky wrote: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."[^4] +Two former Israeli intelligence figures alleged that Maxwell was killed on Mossad orders. The former case officer [[Victor Ostrovsky]], in his 1994 memoir *The Other Side of Deception*, wrote that Maxwell had become a liability once his empire began collapsing and had threatened to expose Mossad operations unless the agency rescued him financially, ending the passage with the line, "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."[^24] Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, in *Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy* (2002), identified Rafi Eitan as having overseen an assassination and named the operative they said carried it out only by the pseudonym "Efraim," describing the killing as having occurred on the aft deck of the Lady Ghislaine before the body entered the water.[^23] Maxwell's family and the Spanish judicial finding rejected all foul-play theories, and no official inquiry has substantiated them; the proximity of Maxwell's death to that of the journalist [[Danny Casolaro]] 87 days earlier, whose "[[The Octopus]]" investigation had encompassed the PROMIS distribution network, was noted by INSLAW and congressional investigators.[^25][^9] -Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, in *Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy* (2002), drawing on sources including Ostrovsky, identified the assassination operation as having been overseen by [[Rafael Eitan]] - the same case officer responsible for running [[Jonathan Pollard]] and, per the PROMIS narrative, for directing the original LAKAM PROMIS operation. Thomas and Dillon identified the operative who carried out the killing as "Efraim," using a pseudonym, and described the death as occurring on the aft deck of the *Lady Ghislaine* before Maxwell's body entered the water.[^5] +### Funeral in Jerusalem -Maxwell's family and the official Spanish judicial finding disputed all foul play theories. The Bua Report found no credible evidence that Maxwell had any connection to the alleged DOJ-orchestrated PROMIS theft or international distribution.[^2] +Maxwell's body was flown to Israel, and on November 10, 1991, he was given a state-style funeral and buried on the [[Mount of Olives]] in [[Jerusalem]], one of Judaism's most revered burial grounds.[^12] The ceremony at Jerusalem's convention center drew President [[Chaim Herzog]], Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and much of the Israeli political establishment, with reporting that at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence were present.[^12][^9] His friend and longtime attorney [[Samuel Pisar]], a Holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish.[^1] + +Herzog eulogized him with the words, "He scaled the heights of human endeavor. Kings and princes waited on him."[^12] Shamir praised the connections and investment Maxwell had brought to Israel during the 1980s, reportedly saying that Maxwell had done more for Israel than could then be told.[^13] The scale of the official Israeli observance was later cited by writers who argued it reflected an intelligence relationship, though attendance at a prominent Jewish philanthropist's funeral is not itself evidence of espionage, and no Israeli official has confirmed that Maxwell was an agent.[^12][^9] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* TrineDay, 1992. -[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice. *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.* March 1993. -[^3]: Thomas, Gordon. *Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.* St. Martin's Press, 1999. -[^4]: Ostrovsky, Victor. *The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda.* HarperCollins, 1994. -[^5]: Thomas, Gordon, and Martin Dillon. *Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul.* Carroll & Graf, 2002. -[^6]: UPI. "Robert Maxwell Dies in Mysterious Plunge at Sea," November 5, 1991; UPI. "Foul Play Ruled Out in Maxwell Death," December 13, 1991. +[^1]: "Robert Maxwell," *Encyclopaedia Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Maxwell +[^2]: "Robert Maxwell's alleged ties to intelligence agencies," *Factually,* 2025. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/robert-maxwell-intelligence-ties-evidence-9493b2 +[^3]: "Great frauds in history: Robert Maxwell," *MoneyWeek,* 2018. https://moneyweek.com/505757/great-frauds-in-history-robert-maxwell +[^4]: "Maxwell - the fallout," *Association of Mirror Pensioners.* https://www.mirrorpensioners.co.uk/news/maxwell-the-fallout/ +[^5]: "Media Magnate Maxwell's Sons Acquitted of Charges They Raided Pension Fund," *The Washington Post,* 1996. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/01/20/media-magnate-maxwells-sons-acquitted-of-charges-they-raided-pension-fund/1841c6cf-8340-4e9e-876c-9f862b4685b5/ +[^6]: "Ghislaine Maxwell," *Encyclopaedia Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ghislaine-Maxwell +[^7]: "What caused Robert Maxwell's mysterious death in 1991?," *Factually,* 2025. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/robert-maxwell-mysterious-death-1991-cause-932d42 +[^8]: "Media Baron Sues Seymour Hersh," *The Washington Post,* 1991. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/10/25/media-baron-sues-seymour-hersh/c16c29e2-04ba-4038-9fff-08113fa33b77/ +[^9]: Pipes, Daniel. "Gideon's Spies by Gordon Thomas," *Commentary,* 1999. https://www.commentary.org/articles/daniel-pipes/gideons-spies-by-gordon-thomas/ +[^10]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* Sheridan Square Press, 1992. +[^11]: "Probe by House finds no 'October surprise,'" *The Baltimore Sun,* 1993. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-01-13-1993013111-story.html +[^12]: "Maxwell, Colossus Even in Death, Laid to Rest on Mount of Olives," *Jewish Telegraphic Agency,* 1991. https://www.jta.org/archive/maxwell-colossus-even-in-death-laid-to-rest-on-mount-of-olives +[^13]: "Maxwell buried on Mount of Olives," *UPI,* 1991. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/11/10/Maxwell-buried-on-Mount-of-Olives/4340689749200/ +[^14]: "Elisabeth Maxwell," *Encyclopaedia Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elisabeth-Maxwell +[^15]: "The Second World War medals and orders awarded to Robert Maxwell," *Noonans Mayfair.* https://www.noonans.co.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/502/ +[^16]: "Maxwell Communication Corp. Plc," *Encyclopedia.com.* https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economics-business-and-labor/businesses-and-occupations/maxwell-communication-corp-plc +[^17]: "During Israel's Dire Need: Arming Israel in 1948," *Aish,* on the Czechoslovak arms shipments to the Haganah authorized by Jan Masaryk and the Avia S-199 aircraft. https://aish.com/during-israels-dire-need-arming-israel-in-1948/ +[^18]: "Robert Maxwell, who completed a $2.5 billion tender offer," *UPI,* 1988. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/11/04/Robert-Maxwell-who-completed-a-25-billion-tender-offer/2052594622800/ +[^19]: "Unravelling the Web," *Pensions Archive Trust,* 2021, on Bishopsgate Investment Management, the Common Investment Fund, the roughly 450 to 460 million pounds taken, the Goldman Sachs share sales, and the 1995 settlement. https://pensionsarchive.org.uk/2021/11/03/unravelling-the-web/ +[^20]: "Maxwell report: All the publisher's men," *The CFO,* 2001, on the Department of Trade and Industry inspectors' report and the criticism of Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte. https://the-cfo.io/2001/05/09/maxwell-report-all-the-publishers-men/ +[^21]: "What caused Robert Maxwell's mysterious death in 1991?," *Factually,* 2025, on the differing pathologists' conclusions and the Judge Oliva ruling. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/robert-maxwell-mysterious-death-1991-cause-932d42 +[^22]: Contemporaneous press reporting on the 1986 Mordechai Vanunu affair and the Sunday Mirror's handling of his Dimona account, on which Ben-Menashe's claims about Nicholas Davies and Oscar Guerrero rest. +[^23]: Thomas, Gordon, and Martin Dillon. *Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul.* Carroll & Graf, 2002. +[^24]: Ostrovsky, Victor. *The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda.* HarperCollins, 1994, on the alleged Mossad motive to eliminate Maxwell as a collapsing liability. +[^25]: U.S. Department of Justice. *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.* March 1993, on the rejection of the Leigh Ratiner and PROMIS-distribution allegations and the proximity of the Casolaro and Maxwell deaths. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Sam Harris.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Sam Harris.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4a984472 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Sam Harris.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Authors & Journalists" +tags: + - Person + - NewAtheism + - Podcasting + - Dialog + - RaceScience + - PeterThiel +alias: + - Samuel Benjamin Harris +summary: "Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, New Atheist author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, a registrant of Peter Thiel's Dialog society whose 2017 Forbidden Knowledge episode platformed Charles Murray's race-and-IQ claims and provoked a public dispute with Ezra Klein over race science." +born: 1967-04-09 +location: "Los Angeles, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Sam Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, neuroscientist, and podcaster who came to prominence as one of the "Four Horsemen" of the [[New Atheism]] movement and built a large following through his [[Making Sense (podcast)|Making Sense]] podcast. He appears as a registrant of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership records leaked in June 2026, and his 2017 podcast episode "Forbidden Knowledge" gave a sympathetic platform to the race-and-IQ claims of [[Charles Murray]], provoking a prolonged public dispute with the journalist [[Ezra Klein]].[^1][^2] + +### New Atheism + +Harris was born in [[Los Angeles]], the son of the actor [[Berkeley Harris]] and the television producer [[Susan Harris]]. He took a BA in philosophy from [[Stanford University]] in 2000 and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the [[University of California, Los Angeles]] in 2009, using functional MRI to study the neural basis of belief. His first book, *The End of Faith* (2004), written after the September 11 attacks, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and spent thirty-three weeks on the *New York Times* bestseller list. With [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Christopher Hitchens]], and [[Daniel Dennett]], Harris became one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, the polemical anti-religion current of the mid-2000s. He followed with *Letter to a Christian Nation* (2006), *The Moral Landscape* (2010), and *Waking Up* (2014).[^3][^4] + +The "Four Horsemen" label came from a two-hour conversation the four men filmed in Hitchens's Washington apartment in September 2007, released on video and later transcribed as a 2018 book with an introduction by [[Stephen Fry]]. Within the movement Harris became its most contested figure for his statements on Islam, including his argument that the faith was uniquely dangerous and his defense of ethnic profiling at airports, which drew a charged 2014 exchange with the actor [[Ben Affleck]] on *[[Real Time with Bill Maher]]* who called the framing "gross" and "racist." Harris also feuded with the linguist [[Noam Chomsky]] in a 2015 email exchange that Harris published, over the morality of American foreign policy.[^4][^8] + +### Making Sense + +Harris launched the *Waking Up* podcast in 2013, later renamed *Making Sense*, which became one of the more widely listened-to long-form interview shows and a fixture of the loose network of commentators labeled the "intellectual dark web." The show paired a meditation-and-secularism brand with conversations on politics, science, and free speech, and it placed Harris among the public intellectuals who circulate through Thiel-adjacent and [[Rationalist Community|rationalist]] circles.[^4] + +The "intellectual dark web" label was coined by the mathematician [[Eric Weinstein]] and popularized by [[Bari Weiss]] in a May 2018 *[[The New York Times|New York Times]]* feature that grouped Harris with [[Jordan Peterson]], [[Ben Shapiro]], [[Joe Rogan]], [[Dave Rubin]], and the Weinstein brothers. Harris built an independent media business around the podcast and the [[Waking Up (app)|Waking Up]] meditation app: in December 2018 he closed his [[Patreon]] account in protest after the platform banned the YouTuber [[Carl Benjamin|Sargon of Akkad]], moving his funding to a direct subscription model, and in November 2022 he deleted his account on [[Twitter]], saying he had blocked roughly 50,000 accounts in his final week over what he described as a flood of conspiracy content after Elon Musk's takeover.[^6][^7] + +### Forbidden Knowledge and the Klein Dispute + +On April 23, 2017, Harris published episode 73, "Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray," presenting Murray, coauthor of *The Bell Curve*, as the victim of a taboo and treating his hereditarian claims about racial IQ differences as suppressed science. The site [[Vox]] published a critique by the researchers [[Eric Turkheimer]], [[Kathryn Paige Harden]], and [[Richard Nisbett]] calling the conversation "pseudoscientific racialist speculation," which triggered a months-long Twitter argument and a two-hour 2018 podcast confrontation between Harris and Vox editor Klein. Klein argued that the framing repackaged "America's most ancient justification for bigotry," while Harris maintained he was defending open inquiry. The episode became a touchstone of the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] discourse that runs through the rationalist and tech-right milieus.[^1][^2][^5] + +The Turkheimer-Harden-Nisbett essay, titled "Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ," ran in May 2017 and argued that the heritability of IQ within a group says nothing about the cause of differences between groups. The recorded Klein debate aired in April 2018 as a joint episode on both men's podcasts; Harris accused Klein of running a "politically correct moral panic," and Klein countered that Harris mistook his own racial and political priors for pure objectivity. The dispute solidified the line between Harris's "intellectual dark web" defense of open inquiry and the mainstream scientific position that the genetic-difference claim was unsupported.[^5][^9] + +### Dialog + +Harris appears in the leaked records of Dialog, the secret society cofounded in 2006 by Thiel and [[Auren Hoffman]] that convenes officials, executives, and public figures at off-the-record annual retreats. In June 2026 the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] and the magazine *WIRED* disclosed a registration list of 222 names for Dialog's 2026 retreat, naming Harris alongside [[Elon Musk]], sitting U.S. senators, and a four-star military commander. His listing places him among the cultural figures convened by the same Thiel network that funded the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Hereticon]] conference.[^1] + +WIRED reported on June 16, 2026 that crimew had extracted the directory directly from hidden code on Dialog's own website. The 2026 retreat was scheduled for August 12 to 16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, and the disclosed list named the senators [[Ted Cruz]] and [[Cory Booker]] and the most senior NATO commander in Europe among the registrants, with a program of off-the-record sessions including "Navigating WWIII" and "Bring Back Nuclear." Harris had long been a public ally of the New Atheism and free-speech causes that overlap with the Thiel-funded rationalist orbit, though his presence on the list did not indicate a stated political alignment with Thiel.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: Harris, Sam. "Forbidden Knowledge: A Conversation with Charles Murray," *Making Sense* podcast, episode 73, April 23, 2017. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbidden-knowledge +[^3]: Harris, Sam. *The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.* W. W. Norton, 2004. +[^4]: "Sam Harris," Edge.org member biography, on the Stanford and UCLA degrees, the New Atheism books, and the podcast. https://www.edge.org/memberbio/sam_harris +[^5]: "Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science," Ezra Klein, *Vox,* 2018, on the Forbidden Knowledge dispute. https://equitablegrowth.org/should-read-ezra-klein-sam-harris-charles-murray-and-the-allure-of-race-science/ +[^6]: "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web," Bari Weiss, *The New York Times,* May 8, 2018, coining the term popularly and naming Harris among the group. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html +[^7]: "Atheist podcaster Sam Harris says he's done with Patreon because of deplatforming," *Fast Company,* December 17, 2018, on the Patreon departure; "#304 - Why I Left Twitter," *Making Sense* with Sam Harris, November 28, 2022, on the Twitter deletion. https://www.fastcompany.com/90283289/atheist-podcaster-sam-harris-says-hes-done-with-patreon-because-of-deplatforming +[^8]: Hitchens, Christopher, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. *The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution.* Random House, 2018, on the September 2007 filmed conversation; "Affleck, Maher battle over Islam," *Times of Israel,* October 2014, on the "gross and racist" exchange; "Read Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris' Unpleasant Email Exchange," Open Culture, May 2015. https://www.openculture.com/2015/05/read-noam-chomsky-sam-harris-unpleasant-email-exchange.html +[^9]: Turkheimer, Eric, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett. "Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ," *Vox,* May 18, 2017, on the critique of the Forbidden Knowledge episode. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Steven Hoffenberg.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Steven Hoffenberg.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b948a1fb --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Steven Hoffenberg.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Organized Crime" +tags: [Person, StevenHoffenberg, TowersFinancial, JeffreyEpstein, PonziScheme, Finance, Fraud, SEC] +alias: ["Steven Jude Hoffenberg", "Stephen Hoffenberg"] +summary: "Founder of Towers Financial Corporation who pleaded guilty in 1995 to a roughly 475 million dollar Ponzi scheme and later claimed Jeffrey Epstein helped architect the fraud, a claim for which Epstein was never charged." +born: 1945-01-12 +died: 2022-08 +location: Derby, Connecticut +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Steven Jude Hoffenberg founded and ran [[Towers Financial Corporation]], a Manhattan debt-collection and securities firm that collapsed in 1993 and was later found to be one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history before that of [[Bernard Madoff]]. He pleaded guilty in 1995 to defrauding investors of about 475 million dollars and served roughly 18 years in federal prison. He hired [[Jeffrey Epstein]] as a consultant in the late 1980s and later publicly claimed Epstein had been a co-architect of the Towers fraud. + +### Early Career + +Hoffenberg was born in Brooklyn in 1945 and entered the debt-collection business in New York in the 1970s, reportedly starting with a small initial investment after dropping out of college.[^6] He built Towers Financial Corporation around the practice of buying delinquent debts, including unpaid hospital bills, bank loans and telephone charges, at steep discounts and pursuing the full balances through aggressive collection.[^6] He briefly held a controlling interest in the [[New York Post]] in the early 1990s during the paper's ownership turmoil.[^6] + +### Towers Financial and the Ponzi Scheme + +Towers Financial Corporation operated as a debt-collection business that bought portfolios of distressed receivables, including debts owed to hospitals and telephone companies, for fractions of their face value, while raising money from thousands of investors through unsecured promissory notes and bonds.[^1] Prosecutors and the [[Securities and Exchange Commission]] determined that the company functioned as a Ponzi scheme, using money from new investors to pay returns to earlier ones while Hoffenberg diverted proceeds.[^1] + +To finance attempted corporate takeovers, Hoffenberg directed Towers to acquire two Illinois insurance companies, United Fire Insurance Co. and Associated Life Insurance Co., in 1987, and prosecutors later found their reserves were looted in the broader fraud.[^3] The Illinois Department of Insurance, then directed by [[James Schacht]], placed the insurers into liquidation and brought a 1991 civil suit that named Jeffrey Epstein in connection with checks drawn on the companies' accounts.[^3] + +The scheme operated between roughly 1988 and 1993, with claimed annual revenues approaching one billion dollars by the time of its collapse.[^1] The SEC charged Towers in February 1993, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 1993.[^2] Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in April 1995 to five criminal charges of defrauding investors of roughly 462 to 475 million dollars; in 1997 Judge [[Robert W. Sweet]] sentenced him to 20 years in prison, a one million dollar fine and roughly 463 million dollars in restitution, and he settled a related SEC civil suit for 60 million dollars.[^2] He served about 18 years and was released from federal custody in 2013.[^2] + +### Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein + +Hoffenberg said he hired Jeffrey Epstein around 1987 as a paid consultant, with reporting citing a salary of about 25,000 dollars per month and, in 1988, a two million dollar non-repayable loan, and he set Epstein up in offices at the [[Villard Houses]] in Manhattan.[^2] At the time Epstein was running his own consulting firm, [[International Assets Group]], from his New York apartment after leaving [[Bear Stearns]].[^3] A Towers attorney confirmed Epstein worked at the firm and recalled drafting a consulting agreement, and [[Terrence Corrigan]], a lawyer for an investor-recovery committee, said Epstein appeared on organizational charts as potentially "the number two or number three person at the firm," though the characterization was disputed.[^3] Court records and the 1991 [[Illinois Department of Insurance]] lawsuit referenced a series of checks payable to "Jeff Epstein" or "Jeff Epstein & Co." drawn on the United Fire and United Diversified accounts and totaling about 215,000 dollars.[^3] + +Hoffenberg and Epstein partnered on attempted corporate takeovers in 1988, using Towers and the captive Illinois insurers as the financing vehicles, including an unsuccessful bid involving [[Pan American World Airways|Pan Am]] and an attempt targeting [[Emery Air Freight]].[^2] A Towers press release identified Epstein as "chairman of the board of directors of Intercontinental Asset Group" and a financial adviser to Towers management in connection with the Pan Am financing.[^3] The Illinois suit alleged Epstein manipulated the price of Emery stock through multiple brokerage accounts he controlled and traded without a broker's license.[^3] Epstein and Hoffenberg traveled together on Hoffenberg's private jet during this period, and Epstein left Towers before its collapse and was never charged in connection with the fraud.[^3] + +### Later Claims and Death + +After his release, Hoffenberg publicly asserted that Jeffrey Epstein had been central to the Towers fraud, telling CBS News that Epstein was "my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars" and describing him as his "wingman."[^3] He claimed in interviews that Epstein had devised the failed Pan Am and Emery takeover schemes and had misappropriated proceeds from the insurance companies for personal use.[^3] Court documents filed by Hoffenberg alleged Epstein was an "architect" of the scheme, but no charges were ever brought against Epstein over Towers, and investigators said no concrete evidence directly tied him to the criminal conspiracy.[^1] Hoffenberg sued Epstein over the fraud's proceeds in 2019.[^4] + +Hoffenberg involved himself in politics in his later years, including reported backing of a super PAC associated with the 2016 presidential campaign of [[Bernie Sanders]].[^5] He gave numerous media interviews after Epstein's 2019 arrest and death, presenting himself as a witness to Epstein's origins while acknowledging his own criminal history.[^3] + +On August 23, 2022 his body was found in advanced decomposition at his apartment in [[Derby, Connecticut]] after a welfare check, prompted when Jeffrey Epstein accuser [[Maria Farmer]] was unable to reach him and contacted police; he was 77.[^2] Farmer told authorities Hoffenberg had recently contracted COVID-19 and had been unable to recover, and investigators estimated he had been dead for at least a week.[^7] An initial autopsy by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found no signs of trauma or foul play, and police said they believed he died of natural causes pending toxicology results.[^7] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "Towers Financial Corporation," summarizing SEC findings and contemporaneous reporting on the Ponzi scheme and Epstein's disputed role. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/lr15053.txt +[^2]: "Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, who once ran a Ponzi scheme, was found dead. He was 77," *NPR,* 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/26/1119746511/jeffrey-epstein-mentor-steven-hoffenberg-dead +[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein worked at Towers Financial with Steven Hoffenberg, who committed Ponzi scheme crimes," *CBS News,* 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-worked-at-towers-financial-with-stephen-hoffenberg-who-committed-ponzi-scheme-crimes/ +[^4]: "Accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's old boss says he knows where the mystery millions came from," *Philadelphia Inquirer,* 2019. https://www.inquirer.com/business/jeffrey-epstein-hoffenberg-trump-clinton-20190711.html +[^5]: "Bernie Sanders Attracts Big Campaign Money Despite Rhetoric," *Time,* 2016. https://time.com/4141201/bernie-sanders-superpac-money/ +[^6]: "Steven Hoffenberg: Who is the former Epstein associate and New York Post owner?," *Yahoo News,* 2019, summarizing his Brooklyn origins, the 1970s debt-collection start and the New York Post stake. https://www.yahoo.com/news/steven-hoffenberg-former-epstein-associate-230443969.html +[^7]: "Who was Steven Hoffenberg? Jeffrey Epstein associate found dead in Connecticut apartment," summarizing the August 2022 welfare check, Maria Farmer's call, and the medical examiner's findings. https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-who-steven-hoffenberg-jeffrey-epstein-associate-found-dead-connecticut-apartment diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy Leary.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy Leary.md index 46baf3e3..39d31839 100644 --- a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy Leary.md +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy Leary.md @@ -2,58 +2,96 @@ category: "Scientists & Researchers" tags: - Person + - TimothyLeary - CIA - MKULTRA - LSD - Psilocybin - Harvard + - Psychedelics - Counterculture -summary: "Harvard psychology lecturer who founded the Psilocybin Research Project in 1960, was fired by Harvard in 1963, and became the counterculture's most visible LSD advocate, operating under documented CIA surveillance while drawing on research networks whose funding traced directly to MKULTRA programs." + - Cyberculture + - Transhumanism +alias: + - Timothy Leary + - Tim Leary +summary: "Timothy Leary was the Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic evangelist who ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project, coined 'turn on, tune in, drop out,' operated under documented CIA surveillance while drawing on research networks whose funding traced to MKULTRA, and in his final decades became a champion of personal computers, space migration, and life extension." born: 1920-10-22 died: 1996-05-31 -location: Springfield, Massachusetts +location: "Springfield, Massachusetts; Beverly Hills, California" created: 2026-06-03 -updated: 2026-06-04 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -Timothy Leary directed clinical research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in [[Oakland]] from 1954 to 1959, where he published *The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality* (1957), which became the basis for personality assessment tools subsequently used by the [[CIA]] and military. He joined [[Harvard University]] as a lecturer in 1959. That year he ate psilocybin mushrooms while on vacation in [[Mexico]], an experience he later described as the most profound of his life, and returned to Harvard with the conviction that psychedelics represented a fundamental tool for psychological research.[^1] + +Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 to May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist who became the most prominent public advocate of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and, in his final decades, a promoter of personal computers, space colonization, and radical life extension. Trained as a research psychologist and briefly a respected figure in personality theory, he ran the [[Harvard Psilocybin Project]] from 1960 until his dismissal in 1963, popularized the slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out," and was described by [[Richard Nixon]], according to widely repeated accounts, as "the most dangerous man in America." He drew, often unknowingly, on drug-research networks whose funding traced back to the CIA's [[MKULTRA]] program, and was himself placed under documented [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] surveillance. In his final decades he promoted the personal computer as a tool of consciousness expansion and became a celebrated figure in the [[Transhumanism|transhumanist]] and cyberculture scenes of the 1980s and 1990s.[^1][^2][^12] + +### From Personality Psychology to Harvard + +Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of a Catholic family, attended the College of the Holy Cross, was expelled from the United States Military Academy at West Point after a cheating-and-honor dispute, and finished his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama. He took a doctorate in psychology at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], in 1950, and his early academic work was conventional and well regarded: he directed clinical research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in [[Oakland]] from 1954 to 1959 and published *The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality* (1957), whose circular model of personality, the "interpersonal circumplex," remained influential in clinical assessment and became the basis for personality-assessment tools later used by the CIA and the military. He joined the faculty of [[Harvard University]]'s Center for Research in Personality in 1959.[^1][^3][^11] + +The turn came in the summer of 1960, when Leary ate psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico, an experience he later called more profound than anything in his prior training. Back at Harvard he and his colleague [[Richard Alpert]], later known as Ram Dass, founded a research program to study the psychological effects of psilocybin, which the Swiss firm [[Sandoz]] supplied in synthesized form.[^3][^4] ### The Harvard Psilocybin Project -Leary established the Harvard Psilocybin Project in fall 1960, obtaining psilocybin free from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Sessions were conducted in both formal research settings and informal apartment gatherings with music and candlelight. His collaborator was [[Richard Alpert]], an assistant professor of education and psychology. Participants in the project's broader circle included [[Allen Ginsberg]] and [[Peter Orlovsky]] (who visited Leary's house in Newton, Massachusetts in December 1960), and [[Aldous Huxley]], then a visiting lecturer at [[MIT]]. Huxley advised Leary to offer the experience to "talented, well-born, intelligent rich" and to work discreetly within institutions rather than provoking public controversy.[^1] +Leary established the project in the fall of 1960, obtaining psilocybin free from Sandoz and running sessions in both formal research settings and informal apartment gatherings with music and candlelight. The studies, by later methodological standards, blurred the line between researcher and subject, with the experimenters frequently taking the drugs alongside their volunteers. [[The Concord Prison Experiment]] (1961 to 1963) administered psilocybin to inmates to test whether the experience reduced recidivism, and the [[Marsh Chapel Experiment]], or "Good Friday Experiment," run by the graduate student [[Walter Pahnke]] in 1962, tested whether the drug could induce genuine mystical experience.[^4][^5] -His curiosity had been stimulated by [[R. Gordon Wasson|Gordon Wasson]]'s 1957 *Life* magazine article about the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms, an expedition that had been partially facilitated by CIA contractor [[James Moore]], who accompanied Wasson's 1956 Mexico expedition while on the Agency payroll. Soon Leary was quoting in his own published work from CIA contractor [[Harold Abramson]] and others, brought together for scholarly drug conferences by the sometime Agency conduit, the [[Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation|Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation]]. From his base at Harvard, Leary became the most vocal and famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, preaching the gospel of consciousness expansion.[^2] +The project's advisers and broader circle traced, in several cases, to networks the CIA had funded. [[Aldous Huxley]], then a visiting lecturer at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], urged Leary to offer the experience to "talented, well-born, intelligent rich" people and to work discreetly within institutions rather than provoke public controversy; the poet [[Allen Ginsberg]] and [[Peter Orlovsky]], who visited Leary's house in Newton, Massachusetts in December 1960, pressed the opposite case, that the drugs should be distributed as widely as possible. [[Henry Murray]], chairman of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, who had run the personality-assessment section of the [[Office of Strategic Services|OSS]] during World War II, approved the project and volunteered for it. Leary's own interest had been stimulated by [[R. Gordon Wasson|Gordon Wasson]]'s 1957 *Life* article on Mexican psilocybin mushrooms, an expedition partly facilitated by the CIA contractor [[James Moore]], and he cited in his published work the research of the CIA contractor [[Harold Abramson]] and others brought together for drug conferences by the [[Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation]], a sometime Agency conduit.[^11][^12] -[[Henry Murray]], chairman of the Harvard Department of Social Relations who had run the Personality Assessments section of the [[Office of Strategic Services|OSS]] during World War II, approved and volunteered for Leary's psilocybin research project.[^1] +### The Good Friday Experiment -### The Good Friday Experiment (1962) +In collaboration with the doctoral candidate Walter Pahnke, Leary administered psilocybin double-blind to ten theology students and professors during a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel at [[Boston University]] in 1962, with ten others receiving a placebo. Nine of the ten psilocybin recipients reported intense religious experiences, and Pahnke's dissertation concluded that the experiences were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with," classical mystical experience.[^5][^11] -In collaboration with doctoral candidate Walter Pahnke, Leary administered psilocybin double-blind to ten theology students and professors during a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel at [[Boston University]] in 1962, with ten others receiving placebos. Nine of the ten psilocybin recipients reported intense religious experiences. Pahnke's dissertation concluded the experiences were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with," classical mystical experience.[^1] +The experiment became one of the most cited studies in the psychology of religion, and a long-term follow-up decades later found that most of the original subjects still regarded it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. It also exemplified the methodological looseness that alarmed Harvard, since the researchers themselves participated and the setting was a working religious service rather than a laboratory.[^5] -### Harvard Firing (1963) +### The Harvard Firing -Tension with Harvard administrators escalated through 1962, triggered in part by a sensationalized *Harvard Crimson* account of a faculty meeting that prompted an FDA investigation. On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted to relieve Leary from teaching duty and terminate his salary, on grounds that he had failed to keep classroom appointments. Alpert was separately dismissed on May 27, 1963, the first Harvard faculty firing in the twentieth century, for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student in an off-campus apartment.[^1] +Tension with Harvard administrators escalated through 1962, triggered in part by a sensationalized *Harvard Crimson* account of a faculty meeting that prompted a Food and Drug Administration investigation. On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted to relieve Leary of his teaching duties and terminate his salary on the grounds that he had failed to keep classroom appointments. Alpert was separately dismissed on May 27, 1963, for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment, making the two the first Harvard faculty fired in the twentieth century for such reasons. By then federal regulators were tightening control of the drugs, and Leary's work moved outside the university entirely.[^1][^4][^11] -### IFIF and the Millbrook Period +### IFIF, Millbrook, and the League for Spiritual Discovery -After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which attracted approximately 3,000 dues-paying members. An attempt to operate a summer session in Zihuatanejo, Mexico was shut down after approximately six weeks by the Mexican government following negative press coverage. Billy Hitchcock, grandson of Gulf Oil founder William Larimer Hitchcock, provided his 4,000-acre Millbrook estate in Dutchess County, [[New York]], at $500 per month. Leary established the Castalia Foundation there and ran high-dose group sessions, published *The Psychedelic Review*, and hosted a wide circle of visitors including Charles Mingus, Alan Watts, R.D. Laing, and journalist Paul Krassner. In April 1966, Dutchess County prosecutor [[G. Gordon Liddy]] led an early-morning raid on the mansion, finding only a small amount of marijuana; the bust was dismissed when the Supreme Court ruled suspects must be informed of their rights upon arrest.[^1] +After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which attracted roughly 3,000 dues-paying members, and attempted a summer session in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, that the Mexican government shut down after about six weeks following negative press. The community then settled at a large estate in Millbrook, New York, lent by Billy Hitchcock, an heir to the Mellon and Gulf Oil fortune, who provided the roughly 4,000-acre property in Dutchess County for about 500 dollars a month. There Leary ran the [[Castalia Foundation]], named for the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's *The Glass Bead Game*, published *The Psychedelic Review*, hosted high-dose group sessions and a wide circle of visitors including Charles Mingus, [[Alan Watts]], R.D. Laing, and the journalist Paul Krassner, and in 1966 founded a quasi-religion, the [[League for Spiritual Discovery]], whose initials spelled [[LSD]] and which he used to argue for the sacramental, constitutionally protected use of psychedelics.[^3][^11] -### Legal Troubles and Prison +With [[Ralph Metzner]] and Alpert he adapted the *Tibetan Book of the Dead* into *The Psychedelic Experience* (1964), a manual for guiding drug sessions that [[John Lennon]] later cited as the source for the song "Tomorrow Never Knows." The Millbrook period coincided with the criminalization of LSD, banned in California in 1966 and federally soon after, and with mounting legal pressure: in April 1966 the Dutchess County assistant district attorney [[G. Gordon Liddy]], later of [[Watergate]], led an early-morning raid on the estate that turned up only a small amount of marijuana, a charge later dismissed. Leary's public role hardened into that of a movement figurehead, the "high priest" of the psychedelic movement, a role he both cultivated and was assigned by a hostile press.[^6][^11] -In December 1965, Leary was arrested at the Laredo, Texas border crossing on discovery of marijuana. He was convicted and faced a potential 30-year sentence. In December 1968, a second arrest followed in Laguna Beach, California. Convicted in February 1970 on both the Laredo and California charges, he received a combined 20-year sentence and was held at San Luis Obispo minimum security prison. On September 12, 1970, he escaped by traversing a highwire across the prison fence and was extracted by members of the Weather Underground. He eventually traveled to Algeria, where he expected to work with Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panther office but was placed under effective house arrest by the Panthers over his LSD advocacy. He subsequently traveled to Switzerland before his arrest in Kabul in 1972 and deportation to Los Angeles, where bail was set at $5,000,000, then the highest set for an American citizen. He testified as a federal informant in exchange for reduced sentencing and was paroled in 1976.[^1] +### Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out + +Leary gave the counterculture its best-known slogan at the Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on January 14, 1967, where he told a crowd of tens of thousands to "turn on, tune in, drop out." He later complained that the phrase was widely misunderstood as a call to passive disengagement, explaining that he meant by it to activate one's neural equipment, to interact harmoniously with the world, and to detach from involuntary commitments, not to drop out of school or society. The line nonetheless became a shorthand for the era and fixed Leary's image as an apostle of dropping out.[^2][^7] + +### Legal Troubles, Prison, Escape, and Exile + +Leary was first arrested in December 1965 at the Laredo, Texas border crossing on a marijuana charge that carried a potential thirty-year sentence; he fought it to the Supreme Court, which in *Leary v. United States* (1969) struck down the Marihuana Tax Act on self-incrimination grounds. A second arrest followed in Laguna Beach, California, in December 1968, and in February 1970 he was convicted on both the Laredo and California charges and given a combined twenty-year term at the California Men's Colony near San Luis Obispo. On September 12, 1970, he escaped over a highwire across the prison fence in an extraction arranged through the radical [[Weather Underground]], who were paid by the psychedelic-dealing [[Brotherhood of Eternal Love]].[^1][^11] + +He fled abroad, first to [[Algeria]], where the exiled [[Black Panther]] leader [[Eldridge Cleaver]] briefly held him under a kind of house arrest over his LSD advocacy, then to [[Switzerland]], [[Austria]], and [[Afghanistan]], where American agents seized him in Kabul in 1973 and returned him to Los Angeles, where bail was set at five million dollars, then the highest ever set for an American citizen. Facing decades of confinement, he provided information to federal investigators about the radicals and lawyers who had aided his escape, a cooperation that drew lasting bitterness from former allies, though prosecutors said it led to no convictions. He was paroled in 1976 by Governor [[Jerry Brown]]. The prison years produced a body of idiosyncratic writing in which Leary recast his ideas in the language of neurology and futurism, most notably the "eight-circuit model of consciousness," set out in *Exo-Psychology* (1977, later revised as *Info-Psychology*).[^1][^3][^8] ### CIA Surveillance -On November 1, 1963, the CIA issued a memorandum ordering all domestic field offices to report immediately on any involvement with Leary, Alpert, or the International Federation for Internal Freedom. The monitoring preceded Leary's public emergence as an LSD spokesman by several years, covering the period when his research was still primarily academic. Neither the specific content of any CIA reporting on Leary nor any operational use of surveillance findings has been declassified.[^2][^3] +On November 1, 1963, the CIA issued a memorandum ordering all domestic field offices to report immediately on any involvement with Leary, Alpert, or the International Federation for Internal Freedom. The monitoring preceded Leary's public emergence as an LSD spokesman by several years, covering the period when his research was still primarily academic. Neither the specific content of any CIA reporting on Leary nor any operational use of surveillance findings has been declassified.[^12][^13] -Leary's research network traced back to CIA-funded programs in ways he likely did not know at the time. Bateson, the anthropologist introduced to [[LSD]] by CIA contractor Harold Abramson, arranged Ginsberg's first LSD experience through a federally funded research program. Ginsberg brought that experience to Leary's house. The Macy Foundation, which had served as a CIA conduit for behavioral research conferences, hosted the scholars whose published work Leary cited. The Geschickter Fund, another CIA front organization, financed related research at overlapping institutions.[^2] +Leary's research network traced back to CIA-funded programs in ways he likely did not know at the time. The anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]], introduced to LSD by Harold Abramson, arranged Ginsberg's first LSD experience through a federally funded research program, and Ginsberg carried that experience to Leary's house. The Macy Foundation, which had served as a CIA conduit for behavioral-research conferences, hosted the scholars whose published work Leary cited, and the Geschickter Fund, another CIA front, financed related research at overlapping institutions.[^12] + +### The Cyberdelic Turn + +From the late 1970s Leary promoted a futurist program he summarized with the acronym SMI2LE, for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension, holding that humanity's next evolutionary step lay in leaving the planet, raising intelligence by technological means, and defeating death. In the 1980s and 1990s he recast the personal computer as the successor to the psychedelic drug, telling interviewers that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and adopting "think for yourself, question authority" as a personal motto. He designed early interactive software, performed spoken-word and multimedia shows, appeared at technology conferences, and became a fixture of the "cyberdelic" scene around *Mondo 2000* magazine and the emerging digital culture of the San Francisco Bay Area.[^2][^9] + +Leary was associated with the [[Extropianism|extropian]] movement around [[Max More]], shared its interest in cryonics and human enhancement, and at one point planned to have his body or head cryonically preserved. Diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, he made his dying a public performance, documenting his decline on an early website and declaring his intent to script his own death; he ultimately decided against cryonic suspension after a falling-out with the provider, and after his death on May 31, 1996, a portion of his ashes was launched into orbit in April 1997 aboard a Celestis rocket that also carried remains of the *Star Trek* creator Gene Roddenberry.[^9][^10] ### The Finders -[[Marion David Pettie]], founder of [[The Finders]], stated that he and Leary had a close connection during the 1960s. According to Pettie, when Leary was based in New York, he would send people down to Pettie's communal property in [[Virginia]], and when people at Pettie's place grew tired of something, they would go up to Leary's. Leary gave Pettie LSD, though Pettie claimed he never took it, keeping it in his refrigerator. A person connected with Leary accidentally burned down a house on Pettie's property while installing a sauna, destroying the LSD in the process.[^4] +[[Marion David Pettie]], the founder of [[The Finders]], stated that he and Leary had a close connection during the 1960s. According to Pettie, when Leary was based in New York he would send people down to Pettie's communal property in [[Virginia]], and when people at Pettie's place grew tired of something they would go up to Leary's. Leary gave Pettie LSD, which Pettie claimed he never took, keeping it in his refrigerator until a person connected with Leary accidentally burned down a house on the property while installing a sauna, destroying the LSD in the process.[^14] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, *Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond*. Grove Press, 1985. Chapters 3 and 4. -[^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979. Chapter 7. -[^3]: CIA memorandum: "International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), ALPERT, Richard, LEARY, Timothy," November 1, 1963. Obtained via FOIA by John Marks, August 1977. -[^4]: Kenn Thomas and Len Bracken, "The Finders' Keeper," *Steamshovel Press* #16, 1998. +[^1]: "Timothy Leary," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on the 1920 birth, the Berkeley doctorate, the Harvard appointment and 1963 dismissal, the legal battles, and the death. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-Leary +[^2]: "Timothy Leary, Pied Piper Of Psychedelic 60's, Dies at 75," *The New York Times,* June 1, 1996, on "turn on, tune in, drop out," the Nixon characterization, and the later computer advocacy. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/01/us/timothy-leary-pied-piper-of-psychedelic-60-s-dies-at-75.html +[^3]: Greenfield, Robert. *Timothy Leary: A Biography.* Harcourt, 2006, on the early life, the Millbrook years, the escape and exile, and the cooperation with investigators. +[^4]: "The Harvard Psilocybin Project," on the 1960 to 1963 studies, the Concord Prison and Marsh Chapel experiments, and the 1963 firings; see also Leary, Timothy. *High Priest.* World Publishing, 1968. +[^5]: Pahnke, Walter N. "Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness," doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1963, on the Good Friday Experiment. +[^6]: Leary, Timothy, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. *The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.* University Books, 1964. +[^7]: *Leary v. United States,* 395 U.S. 6 (1969); and Leary, Timothy. *Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era.* Tarcher, 1983, on the Human Be-In and the meaning of the slogan. +[^8]: Leary, Timothy. *Exo-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers* (1977), revised as *Info-Psychology* (1987), on the eight-circuit model. +[^9]: "Timothy Leary's Last Trip," *Wired,* and Leary, Timothy. *Chaos and Cyber Culture.* Ronin Publishing, 1994, on SMI2LE, "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s," and the cyberdelic period. https://www.wired.com/1996/05/leary-2/ +[^10]: "A Send-Off Into Space for Leary and Others," *The New York Times,* April 22, 1997, on the Celestis launch carrying the ashes of Leary and Gene Roddenberry. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/22/us/a-send-off-into-space-for-leary-and-others.html +[^11]: Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain. *Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.* Grove Press, 1985, chapters 3 and 4, on the Kaiser research and personality tools, Huxley's advice, Henry Murray's OSS role, IFIF and the Zihuatanejo session, the Millbrook estate, the visitors, and the Liddy raid. +[^12]: Marks, John D. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979, chapter 7, on the Wasson and James Moore expedition, Harold Abramson and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, the CIA surveillance of Leary, Bateson and Ginsberg's first LSD experience, and the Geschickter Fund. +[^13]: CIA memorandum, "International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), ALPERT, Richard, LEARY, Timothy," November 1, 1963, obtained via FOIA by John Marks, August 1977. +[^14]: Thomas, Kenn, and Len Bracken. "The Finders' Keeper," *Steamshovel Press* no. 16, 1998, on Marion David Pettie's account of his connection with Leary. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy May.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy May.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5b5a3aa7 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Timothy May.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - TimothyMay + - Cypherpunks + - CryptoAnarchy + - Cryptography + - Libertarianism + - Extropianism +alias: + - Tim May + - Timothy C. May +summary: "Timothy May was a former Intel physicist who wrote 'The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,' cofounded the cypherpunks mailing list, and devised the BlackNet thought experiment." +born: 1951-12-21 +died: 2018-12-13 +location: "Santa Cruz, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Timothy C. May (1951 to 2018), known as Tim May, was an American engineer and writer who became the leading theorist of crypto-anarchism and a founder of the [[Cypherpunks]] movement. He wrote "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988, cofounded the cypherpunks mailing list in 1992 with [[Eric Hughes]] and [[John Gilmore]], and authored the long crypto-anarchist FAQ known as [[The Cyphernomicon|the Cyphernomicon]]. He was an [[Extropianism|extropian]] and a radical libertarian who held that strong encryption and untraceable digital money would dissolve the power of the state over economic and personal life.[^1][^2] + +### Intel Career + +May took a physics degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974 and joined [[Intel]] the same year as a staff engineer in its memory products division. In February 1977 he traced random single-bit failures in dynamic memory to alpha particles emitted by trace uranium and thorium in the ceramic chip packaging, which passed through the silicon storage nodes and deposited enough charge to flip a stored bit. He and Murray H. Woods published the finding as "Alpha-Particle-Induced Soft Errors in Dynamic Memories" in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in January 1979, and the two received the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award in 1981. The "soft error" mechanism they identified became a permanent design constraint on memory and logic, mitigated through high-purity packaging materials, polyimide die coatings, larger per-cell charge, and error-correcting codes.[^7][^8] + +May cashed in his Intel stock options and retired in 1986 at the age of thirty-four, devoting himself thereafter to reading and writing on cryptography, physics, mathematics, and politics.[^1][^2] + +### Crypto-Anarchism + +May wrote "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988 and distributed it at the Crypto '88 and Hackers conferences, recirculating it to the cypherpunks list in 1992. It opened "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy" and argued that cryptographic methods would "fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions." His 1994 Cyphernomicon laid out the body of crypto-anarchist thought for the list, and he was its most prolific contributor. He summarized his own politics as "keep your hands off my stuff," with the core of libertarianism reduced to "leave me alone."[^2][^3][^4] + +May drew an explicit parallel between cryptography and the printing press, arguing that just as printing eroded the power of medieval guilds and the social structures around them, public-key cryptography would erode the state's power over economic transactions and the flow of information. He anticipated that this would enable not only privacy but black markets, tax evasion, and the collapse of national borders as constraints on commerce, outcomes he welcomed rather than feared. At the first cypherpunks meeting he ran a "crypto-anarchy game" assigning attendees the roles of citizens and federal agents to dramatize the contest between surveillance and untraceable communication.[^4][^12] + +### BlackNet + +May created [[BlackNet]] as a thought experiment in 1993, an imagined anonymous marketplace in which any information, including trade secrets and classified material, could be bought and sold using anonymous remailers, message pools, and untraceable digital cash, with "nation-states, export laws, patent laws, [and] national security considerations" treated as relics of a pre-cyberspace era. The seed document opened, "Your name has come to our attention. We have reason to believe you may be interested in the products and services our new organization, BlackNet, has to offer," solicited "trade secrets, processes, production methods (esp. in semiconductors)" and "new product plans, from children's toys to cruise missiles," and proposed to pay sellers in an internal currency it called "CryptoCredits." May did not post it to Usenet himself; he leaked it via remailer to the cypherpunks list, attaching a 1024-bit PGP key under the BlackNet name, and Lance Detweiler reposted it to dozens of newsgroups before May admitted authorship.[^9][^10] + +The Cyphernomicon also discussed anonymous information markets and, in its more extreme passages, assassination markets, a concept the cypherpunk [[Jim Bell]] developed separately as "assassination politics" in an essay serialized from April 1995. Bell's scheme offered a prize to whoever correctly "predicted" the death of a listed target, settled through public-key encryption and anonymous digital cash routed across a cascade of remailers, reusing the same cryptographic toolkit as BlackNet.[^4][^11] + +### Later Views and Death + +After the cypherpunks faded in the early 2000s, May posted to other online groups and expressed racist sentiments, and the Cyphernomicon itself contained disparaging language about "nonproductive" citizens. He died of natural causes at his home near [[Santa Cruz]], California, in December 2018 at the age of sixty-six, days before his sixty-seventh birthday.[^1][^2] + +Asked by CoinDesk in October 2018 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper, May sent back a thirty-page critique of the cryptocurrency industry that had grown from cypherpunk ideas. He wrote that "I sure don't think it involved bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police," warned that the talk of "governance" and "regulation" risked creating "a surveillance state, a dossier society," and said of the speculative mania, "I think Satoshi would barf." The cryptographers around him, including [[Hal Finney]], [[Nick Szabo]], and [[Wei Dai]], produced the digital-cash designs that preceded [[Bitcoin]], and May is frequently invoked as a forerunner of the cryptocurrency movement and the [[Satoshi Nakamoto|Satoshi]]-era crypto-libertarian politics.[^4][^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Tim May, Father of 'Crypto Anarchy,' Is Dead at 66," *Reason,* December 2018, on his Intel career, the alpha particle work, his 1986 retirement, the manifesto, the cypherpunks, BlackNet, and his politics. https://reason.com/2018/12/16/tim-may-influential-writer-on-crypto-ana/ +[^2]: "Influential cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist Tim May dies aged 67," *The Register,* December 2018. https://www.theregister.com/2018/12/17/timothy_c_may/ +[^3]: May, Timothy C. "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988, recirculated 1992. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html +[^4]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt +[^5]: "Dark Markets: Tim May's BlackNet," *Chainrift Research,* on the BlackNet thought experiment and anonymous information markets. https://medium.com/chainrift-research/dark-markets-tim-mays-blacknet-7b7738e0617c +[^6]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on May, the extropians, and the cypherpunk forerunners of Bitcoin. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^7]: May, Timothy C., and Murray H. Woods. "Alpha-Particle-Induced Soft Errors in Dynamic Memories," *IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices,* vol. 26, no. 1, January 1979, pp. 2-9. DOI: 10.1109/T-ED.1979.19370. +[^8]: Baumann, Robert. "Soft Errors in Advanced Computer Systems," *IEEE Design & Test of Computers,* May-June 2005, on the alpha-particle soft-error mechanism, critical charge, and mitigation. "IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award," IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki, listing the 1981 award to May and Woods. https://ethw.org/IEEE_W.R.G._Baker_Award +[^9]: May, Timothy C. "Introduction to BlackNet," 1993, archived at MIT CSAIL. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/blacknet.txt +[^10]: May, Timothy C. "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy," in *True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier,* ed. James Frenkel, Tor, 2001, on the BlackNet leak via remailer, the Detweiler repost, and May's admission of authorship. https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/1996-may.pdf +[^11]: Bell, Jim. "Assassination Politics," Part 1, April 1995. https://jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/AP.pdf +[^12]: May, Timothy C. "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988, on the printing-press analogy and the dissolution of state control over transactions; and *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994, on the crypto-anarchy game. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html +[^13]: "Enough With the ICO-Me-So-Horny-Get-Rich-Quick-Lambo Crypto," *CoinDesk,* October 19, 2018, on May's KYC, AML, and "surveillance state" critique and the "Satoshi would barf" remark. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/10/19/enough-with-the-ico-me-so-horny-get-rich-quick-lambo-crypto diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/William MacAskill.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/William MacAskill.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..974af9f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/William MacAskill.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - Oxford + - SamBankmanFried + - FTX +alias: + - Will MacAskill + - William David MacAskill +summary: "William MacAskill is a Scottish moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded effective altruism through Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism, wrote the longtermist book What We Owe the Future, recruited Sam Bankman-Fried into earning-to-give, and resigned from the FTX Future Fund when the exchange collapsed in 2022." +born: 1987-03-24 +location: "Oxford, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +William MacAskill (born March 24, 1987) is a Scottish moral philosopher and an associate professor at the [[University of Oxford]] who is one of the originators of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement. He cofounded its principal organizations, popularized the philosophy of [[Longtermism|longtermism]] in his 2022 book *What We Owe the Future*, and recruited the cryptocurrency entrepreneur [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] into the movement's "earning to give" strategy. When Bankman-Fried's [[FTX]] exchange collapsed in 2022, MacAskill resigned from the FTX Future Fund advisory board he had helped lead, and the fraud became the central reputational event of his career.[^1][^2] + +### Oxford and the Founding of Effective Altruism + +Born William Crouch in [[Glasgow]], MacAskill took a BA in philosophy at Jesus College, [[Cambridge]] in 2008 and a BPhil and DPhil at Oxford, completing the doctorate at St Anne's College in 2014 under [[John Broome]] and [[Krister Bykvist]]. In 2009, as a graduate student, he and the philosopher [[Toby Ord]] cofounded [[Giving What We Can]], a society whose members pledge to donate at least ten percent of their income to the most cost-effective charities. In 2011 he cofounded [[80,000 Hours]], which advises on high-impact careers, with [[Benjamin Todd]], and the two organizations were placed under an umbrella body, the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], the same year. MacAskill's 2015 book *Doing Good Better* served as the movement's popular introduction.[^1][^3] + +Born William Crouch, he and his wife the philosopher Amanda Hall married in 2013 and adopted the surname MacAskill, her grandmother's maiden name; after their 2015 divorce she became Amanda Askell and went on to lead personality-alignment work at [[Anthropic]]. The Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours were folded under the umbrella charity [[Effective Ventures]], one of the institutions that had to repay FTX money after the collapse, returning 26,786,503 dollars to the bankruptcy estate in 2024 and spinning its constituent projects out as independent legal entities. MacAskill held a post at Oxford's [[Global Priorities Institute]] and later joined the research nonprofit Forethought, where in March 2025 he and Fin Moorhouse published "Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion," arguing that AI could compress a century of change into a decade and that society should plan now for the resulting upheavals.[^9][^10] + +### Longtermism and What We Owe the Future + +MacAskill's work moved with the movement toward longtermism, the view he defined as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time." His 2022 book *What We Owe the Future* argued that because future people vastly outnumber the living, shaping the far future, including by reducing the risk of human extinction from advanced artificial intelligence, is a moral priority of the first order. The book was promoted heavily, with appearances including *The Daily Show*, and arrived alongside the academic longtermism of [[Nick Bostrom]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]]. MacAskill has stated that he gives away half his income.[^4][^5] + +The promotional campaign behind *What We Owe the Future* was unusually expensive for a philosophy book, with a marketing budget reported in the millions of dollars, much of it drawn from effective-altruism funders including the [[FTX Future Fund]]. The book reached the *New York Times* bestseller list, and MacAskill appeared on *The Daily Show* and on the cover of *TIME* in August 2022, weeks before FTX collapsed. Critics including the philosopher [[Émile P. Torres]] argued that *What We Owe the Future* downplayed how far the longtermist framework, taken seriously, could license sacrificing present welfare for speculative future populations.[^5][^11] + +### Recruitment of Sam Bankman-Fried + +In 2012 MacAskill spoke at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], where Bankman-Fried, then a physics undergraduate, heard him present the earning-to-give idea: that a person can do more good by maximizing income and donating it than by direct charitable work. MacAskill advised Bankman-Fried to pursue high-paying quantitative trading, and Bankman-Fried went to [[Jane Street Capital]] before founding [[Alameda Research]] and FTX. He became the movement's largest single funder. MacAskill served as an unpaid adviser to the FTX Future Fund, announced in 2022, which directed FTX money to longtermist and AI-safety causes.[^6][^7] + +MacAskill stayed close to Bankman-Fried as the fortune grew. He introduced Bankman-Fried to Elon Musk in 2022 in an attempt to interest the entrepreneur in a joint bid for Twitter, a text exchange that surfaced in the discovery for Musk's later Twitter litigation. After the collapse, federal prosecutors named MacAskill in court filings as one of the public figures Bankman-Fried had cultivated, and the Future Fund's leadership conceded it had relied on a benefactor whose business it did not scrutinize.[^7][^11] + +### The FTX Collapse and Fallout + +A March 2023 *TIME* investigation reported that effective-altruism leaders, MacAskill among them, had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct years before the collapse. When FTX failed in November 2022, the entire Future Fund team, including [[Nick Beckstead]] and [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], resigned, stating they had been "shocked" and condemning any deception by FTX leadership "in the strongest possible terms." Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud in November 2023. The episode destroyed the movement's largest funding source, drew scrutiny to MacAskill's role in shaping Bankman-Fried's worldview, and discredited effective altruism's public standing.[^2][^8] + +The *TIME* account stated that figures connected to the movement, including the entrepreneurs Tara Mac Aulay and others who had worked with Bankman-Fried at Alameda Research in 2018, had raised concerns about his honesty and management directly to MacAskill years before FTX's rise. MacAskill issued a public statement after the collapse saying that if Bankman-Fried's conduct was as alleged he had been "completely deceived," that he felt "blindsided," and that the fraud betrayed everything effective altruism stood for. He largely withdrew from public commentary for a period before re-emerging through Forethought to focus on the governance of advanced AI rather than on the cause-prioritization and earning-to-give framing he had built the movement on.[^8][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "William MacAskill," EA Forum topic page, on the 1987 birth, Cambridge and Oxford degrees, and the founding of Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/william-macaskill +[^2]: "Sam Bankman-Fried's 'Effective Altruism' Team Resigns Amid FTX Meltdown," *Gizmodo,* November 2022. https://gizmodo.com/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-effective-altruism-crypto-1849773116 +[^3]: MacAskill, William. *Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.* Gotham Books, 2015. +[^4]: MacAskill, William. *What We Owe the Future.* Basic Books, 2022. +[^5]: "Giving on the Edge: Effective Altruism's Post-SBF Comeback," *The Hollywood Reporter,* on the *What We Owe the Future* promotion and the 50-percent giving claim. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-comeback-1236327219/ +[^6]: "Sam Bankman-Fried," 80,000 Hours profile, on the MIT talk and Bankman-Fried's adoption of earning-to-give and route to Jane Street Capital. https://80000hours.org/stories/sam-bankman-fried/ +[^7]: "Who Is William MacAskill, the Oxford Philosopher Who Shaped Sam Bankman-Fried's Worldview?" Yahoo Finance, 2022. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/william-macaskill-oxford-philosopher-shaped-145807409.html +[^8]: "Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed," *TIME,* March 2023. https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ +[^9]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," EA Forum, on Effective Ventures' 26,786,503-dollar repayment and the spinning-out of its projects; "William MacAskill" and "Amanda Askell," on the 2013 marriage, the adopted surname, and the 2015 divorce. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev +[^10]: MacAskill, William, and Fin Moorhouse. "Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion," Forethought, March 11, 2025. https://www.forethought.org/research/preparing-for-the-intelligence-explosion +[^11]: "Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and a secret text," *Semafor,* November 22, 2022, on MacAskill's March 2022 introduction of Bankman-Fried to Musk over a joint Twitter bid. https://www.semafor.com/article/11/22/2022/sam-bankman-fried-elon-and-a-secret-text diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Carl Schmitt.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Carl Schmitt.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ae6a6bff --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Carl Schmitt.md @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - CarlSchmitt + - PoliticalTheology + - Jurisprudence + - Nazism + - Katechon + - PeterThiel +alias: + - Carl Schmitt + - Schmitt +summary: "Carl Schmitt was the German jurist and Nazi-era 'crown jurist' who theorized the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, political theology, and the katechon, and whose work was revived on the contemporary right and woven through Peter Thiel's 'Straussian Moment' essay and 2025 Antichrist lectures." +born: 1888-07-11 +died: 1985-04-07 +location: "Plettenberg, Germany" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 to April 7, 1985) was a German jurist and political theorist whose work on sovereignty, the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, and political theology made him one of the most influential and contested thinkers of the twentieth century. He joined the [[Nazi Party]] in 1933 and became known as the "crown jurist" of the Third Reich, providing legal justification for the regime before falling from official favor in 1936. His writings were rehabilitated in the postwar decades and underwent a marked revival on the contemporary right; [[Peter Thiel]] drew on Schmitt in his 2007 essay "[[Leo Strauss|The Straussian Moment]]" and on Schmitt's concept of the katechon in his 2025 lectures on the [[Antichrist]].[^1][^2] + +### Life and Career + +Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, in Westphalia, into a Catholic family, and studied law at Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, taking his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1910 and his habilitation in 1916. He held chairs at Greifswald, Bonn, the Handelshochschule in Berlin, Cologne, and from 1933 the University of Berlin, and he became one of the leading constitutional lawyers of the [[Weimar Republic]]. During the republic's final crisis he advised the presidential governments of Heinrich Bruning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher on the use of emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, and in 1932 he argued the government's side in the Preussenschlag case, defending the Reich's removal of the elected Prussian state government.[^1][^3] + +After Adolf Hitler took power Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, was appointed a Prussian state councillor by Hermann Goring, and became president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. He wrote in defense of the regime's lawless violence, most notoriously in the 1934 article "The Fuhrer Protects the Law," which justified the extrajudicial killings of the Night of the Long Knives, and he organized a 1936 conference on purging German law of Jewish influence. In December 1936 the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps attacked him as an opportunist whose Catholicism and earlier associations made his conversion suspect, and he lost his Party offices while retaining his Berlin chair and state councillorship. Interned by the Allies after the war and questioned at Nuremberg, he refused to undergo denazification and was barred from teaching, returning to Plettenberg, where he continued to write and receive visitors until his death in 1985.[^1][^4] + +### The State of Exception and Sovereignty + +Schmitt's *Political Theology* (1922) opens with the sentence "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," locating the essence of sovereign power not in the normal operation of law but in the authority to suspend the legal order in an emergency, the Ausnahmezustand or state of exception. On this decisionist account the validity of law rests ultimately on a concrete decision rather than on an impersonal norm, and the genuine sovereign is whoever can determine that an exceptional situation exists and what is to be done about it. The argument was a frontal assault on the liberal and positivist legal theory, associated with Hans Kelsen, that sought to dissolve sovereignty into a self-sufficient hierarchy of norms.[^5][^6] + +The same book advanced his thesis of political theology, that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," both in their historical origin, where the omnipotent lawgiver replaced the omnipotent God, and in their structure, where the exception stands to the legal order as the miracle stands to the laws of nature. In *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* (1923) he attacked liberal parliamentarism as a system of endless discussion incapable of decision, and in *Legality and Legitimacy* (1932) he argued that the Weimar constitution's neutrality toward its own enemies left it unable to defend itself, an analysis later read as preparing the ground for the regime that followed.[^5][^7] + +### The Concept of the Political + +In *The Concept of the Political* (1927, expanded 1932) Schmitt held that the specifically political distinction, irreducible to the moral, aesthetic, or economic, is that between friend and enemy. The enemy, the hostis, is the public adversary, the other with whom conflict can in the extreme case mean physical killing, and the reality of this possibility is what gives political life its seriousness. Liberalism, he argued, tries to dissolve the political into the spheres of ethics and economics and so cannot grasp it, yet the friend-enemy grouping persists beneath the liberal surface. Strauss's 1932 "Notes" on the book pressed exactly this point, arguing that Schmitt's affirmation of the political remained dependent on the liberalism it opposed, and Schmitt revised passages of the third edition in response.[^8][^9] + +Schmitt's later *The Nomos of the Earth* (1950) developed a theory of international order grounded in the appropriation of land and the historical jus publicum Europaeum, the European law of nations that he argued had once "bracketed" war by treating the enemy as a legitimate equal rather than a criminal to be annihilated. He lamented the dissolution of this order into a moralized, total enmity, a theme that runs into his late reflections on partisan warfare in *Theory of the Partisan* (1963).[^10] + +### The Katechon + +Drawing on the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, in which the Apostle Paul writes of "the one who now restrains" the coming of the lawless one, Schmitt made the figure of the katechon, Greek for the restrainer, a recurring element of his thought. In the essay "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950) and in *The Nomos of the Earth* he treated the katechon as the power that holds back the Antichrist and the end of history, identifying it variously with the Roman Empire, the medieval German emperors, and other concrete bearers of order, and he called it the only Christian conception that made historical action possible by giving a meaning to the interval before the end. The concept supplied a theology of the restraining state for a thinker who saw chaos as the alternative to order.[^11][^12] + +In his postwar notebooks, published as *Glossarium*, Schmitt returned repeatedly to the katechon and wrote that he believed in it as the only way a Christian could make sense of history, adding that for every age one must name its bearer. Later scholarship has read the idea as the theological core of his politics: an account of authority whose task is to delay catastrophe rather than to achieve perfection, and which therefore justifies the sovereign who maintains order against the forces of dissolution. [[Rene Girard]]'s late *Battling to the End* (2007) likewise turned to the Pauline drama of restraint and apocalypse.[^16] + +### The Postwar Revival + +Schmitt's reception broadened far beyond the right after the war, taken up by thinkers as varied as the Marxists Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, whose *State of Exception* (2003) made Schmitt central to debates over post-September 11 emergency powers, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and, on the contemporary right, the editor [[Curtis Yarvin]] and writers associated with [[Neoreaction]] and with [[Nick Land]]. The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed Schmitt's exchange with Strauss in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (1995).[^13] + +Thiel's "The Straussian Moment" enlists Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction to argue that the West, after the [[September 11 attacks]], had to recognize a real enemy that the optimistic Enlightenment anthropology of Hobbes and Locke could not name. In the four-part Antichrist lectures Thiel delivered in [[San Francisco]] in September 2025, audio of which was reported by the *Washington Post* and *Reason*, he framed his argument through Schmitt's katechon, casting the American imperium as at once the natural candidate for the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist and a candidate for the one-world tyranny he equated with the Antichrist itself; he named [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], [[Nick Bostrom]], and Greta Thunberg among those he called legionnaires of the Antichrist for advocating global governance to halt technology.[^14][^15] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Carl Schmitt," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the 1888 Plettenberg birth, the Weimar career, the 1933 Nazi Party membership, the "crown jurist" role, the 1936 fall, and the postwar refusal of denazification. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/ +[^2]: "Carl Schmitt," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* biography of the German jurist and theorist of political realism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Schmitt +[^3]: Bendersky, Joseph W. *Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich.* Princeton University Press, 1983, on the Weimar advisory roles and the Preussenschlag case. +[^4]: "The Nazi Jurist," *Claremont Review of Books,* on the 1934 defense of the Night of the Long Knives, the 1936 anti-Jewish law conference, and the Das Schwarze Korps attack. https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-nazi-jurist/ +[^5]: Schmitt, Carl. *Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty* (1922), trans. George Schwab, MIT Press, 1985. +[^6]: "Carl Schmitt," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the decision, the exception, and the critique of Kelsen's normativism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/ +[^7]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* (1923); *Legality and Legitimacy* (1932). +[^8]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Concept of the Political* (1927, expanded 1932), trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1996. +[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932); on Schmitt's praise and the third-edition revisions, see Meier below. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/ +[^10]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum* (1950), trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telos Press, 2003; and *Theory of the Partisan* (1963). +[^11]: Schmitt, Carl. "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950); and *The Nomos of the Earth,* on the katechon as the restrainer of the Antichrist. +[^12]: "It's Carl Schmitt's Moment," *Democracy Journal,* on the katechon, the state of exception, and the contemporary revival. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/77/its-carl-schmitts-moment/ +[^13]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax, University of Chicago Press, 1995; and Agamben, Giorgio. *State of Exception,* University of Chicago Press, 2005. +[^14]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007. +[^15]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/; and "I Listened to Over 7 Hours of Peter Thiel's Leaked Antichrist Lectures," *Reason,* October 14, 2025, on Thiel's use of Schmitt's katechon. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/ +[^16]: Schmitt, Carl. *Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947 bis 1951,* on the katechon and the demand to name its bearer in each age; and "The modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's katechontism as reactionary chronopolitics," *Frontiers in Political Science,* 2022, on the katechon as the theological core of his politics. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2022.957094/full diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Chamath Palihapitiya.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Chamath Palihapitiya.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f6507472 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Chamath Palihapitiya.md @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - ChamathPalihapitiya + - SocialCapital + - Facebook + - SPAC + - AllInPodcast + - VentureCapital +alias: + - Chamath Palihapitiya +summary: "Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American venture capitalist who ran Facebook's user-growth team, founded Social Capital, sponsored the Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs that took Virgin Galactic, Opendoor, Clover Health, and SoFi public, and cohosts the All-In Podcast." +born: 1976-09-03 +location: "Sri Lanka (born); Ottawa, Canada (raised)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Chamath Palihapitiya (born September 3, 1976) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American venture capitalist who ran the user-growth team at [[Facebook]] from 2007 to 2011, founded the firm [[Social Capital|Social Capital]] in 2011, sponsored the Social Capital Hedosophia series of blank-check companies that took [[Virgin Galactic|Virgin Galactic]], [[Opendoor|Opendoor]], [[Clover Health|Clover Health]], and [[SoFi|SoFi]] public in 2019 through 2021, and cohosts the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]] with [[David Sacks]], [[Jason Calacanis|Jason Calacanis]], and [[David Friedberg|David Friedberg]]. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026.[^1] + +### From Ottawa to Facebook + +Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Ottawa, Canada, after his family emigrated when he was a small child and remained in Canada following his father's posting to the Sri Lankan diplomatic mission. He has described a financially precarious childhood and work at a Burger King from the age of fourteen. He took a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1999 and began his career as an associate at the Canadian bank BMO Nesbitt Burns.[^2] + +He moved to Silicon Valley and held roles at the music-software maker Winamp and at AOL, where he ran the instant-messaging division, before joining Facebook in 2007. At Facebook he led the user-growth organization, the team credited with the data-driven acquisition and retention methods that carried the service toward one billion users. He left Facebook in 2011. His compensation at Facebook was paid substantially in equity, and the stake became the basis of the fortune he carried into venture investing, though no reputable source has published a specific figure for its size at his departure.[^2][^3] + +### The 2017 Stanford Remarks + +At a [[Stanford Graduate School of Business|Stanford Graduate School of Business]] event recorded on November 10, 2017, and widely reported the following month, Palihapitiya said he felt "tremendous guilt" about his work at Facebook and that "the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth." He added that he does not allow his own children to use "this shit." Facebook responded that Palihapitiya had not worked at the company in more than six years and that it had changed substantially since his tenure.[^4] + +Palihapitiya softened the remarks after the coverage, describing Facebook as "an amazing company" and stating that social media's impact to that point had been "mostly overwhelmingly good," while maintaining that the advertising business model "allows us to conflate and confuse truth and popularity."[^4] + +### Social Capital and the Partner Exodus + +Palihapitiya founded the Palo Alto venture firm The Social+Capital Partnership in 2011, later renamed Social Capital, with early partners including Mamoon Hamid, Ted Maidenberg, and his then-wife Brigette Lau. The firm's portfolio included Slack, Box, and SoFi. Beginning in 2017 and accelerating through 2018, the firm lost most of its investing partners: Hamid left for [[Kleiner Perkins|Kleiner Perkins]], Marc Mezvinsky departed, and Maidenberg, Arjun Sethi, and Jonathan Hsu left in 2018 to cofound Tribe Capital.[^5][^6] + +In 2018 Social Capital stopped accepting outside capital and converted to a holding-company model that invests off its own balance sheet rather than from limited-partner funds. The shift removed the firm from the conventional venture structure of raising and deploying third-party money, and it positioned the SPAC vehicles Palihapitiya launched the following year as the firm's primary public-facing investment activity.[^5][^6] + +### The Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs + +Through Social Capital Hedosophia, a series of special-purpose acquisition companies cofounded with the financier Ian Osborne and tickered IPOA through IPOF, Palihapitiya became the most prominent sponsor of the 2020 to 2021 SPAC wave, drawing the "SPAC king" label. The first vehicle, IPOA, merged with Virgin Galactic in a deal announced July 9, 2019, at an enterprise value of roughly 1.5 billion dollars, with IPOA contributing about 800 million dollars and Palihapitiya adding roughly 100 million dollars personally; the transaction created the first publicly traded human-spaceflight company. IPOB merged with the home-flipping company Opendoor in a 4.8 billion dollar deal in 2020, IPOC with the [[Medicare Advantage|Medicare Advantage]] insurer Clover Health at a 3.7 billion dollar enterprise value, and IPOE with the consumer-finance company SoFi at 8.65 billion dollars. IPOD and IPOF found no targets and liquidated in October 2022, returning capital to investors.[^7][^8][^9] + +Most of the completed deals fell sharply from their post-merger highs. On March 5, 2021, Palihapitiya sold his entire remaining personal stake in Virgin Galactic, 6.2 million shares at an average of 34.32 dollars for roughly 213 million dollars, while retaining an indirect position through Social Capital Hedosophia; the sale drew criticism given his public promotion of the company. A second SPAC series under the Social Capital Suvretta name, tickered DNAA through DNAD, produced two completed mergers that also collapsed and two further liquidations.[^10] + +### Clover Health, Hindenburg, and the SEC Letter + +On February 4, 2021, the short-seller [[Hindenburg Research|Hindenburg Research]] published a report alleging that Clover Health had failed to disclose a Department of Justice investigation, stating it had obtained a civil investigative demand covering roughly twelve aspects of the company's business and its Clover Assistant software, and accusing Palihapitiya of misleading investors. Hindenburg disclosed that it held no position in the stock. Clover subsequently confirmed it had received a document-preservation request from the Securities and Exchange Commission covering the period from January 1, 2020, tied to the report's claims.[^11][^12] + +Palihapitiya posted a "you're welcome" reply on the platform then known as Twitter around February 3, 2021, shortly before the Hindenburg report drew wide attention. He was later named in shareholder suits within the broader 2021 to 2023 wave of SPAC litigation alleging that sponsors profited from discounted founder shares while promoting mergers to retail investors. No reputable source has reported a formal Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against Palihapitiya personally; the disclosed regulatory inquiry was directed at Clover Health.[^11][^13] + +### The Uyghur Remarks + +On a January 2022 episode of the All-In Podcast, Palihapitiya said, "Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs," telling a cohost, "you bring it up because you really care, and I think it's nice that you care, the rest of us don't care," and placing the issue "below my line" of concerns relative to supply chains, climate, American health care, and a possible conflict over Taiwan. The remarks drew immediate backlash. The Golden State Warriors, in which Palihapitiya then held an ownership stake, publicly stated that he "does not speak on behalf of our franchise" and that "his views certainly don't reflect those of our organization."[^14][^15] + +Palihapitiya issued a clarification, writing that he came across "as lacking empathy," that he acknowledged that "entirely," and that as a refugee whose family fled a country "with its own human rights issues," he believed "human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere."[^14] + +### The All-In Podcast and the Political Turn + +The All-In Podcast launched on March 19, 2020, with Palihapitiya, Calacanis, Sacks, and Friedberg as the rotating cohosts known as "the besties." The program became a media channel for the cohort's positions on technology regulation, cryptocurrency, and defense procurement. Palihapitiya had been a Democratic donor in earlier election cycles before moving toward the technology-right alignment that the podcast came to represent.[^16] + +In 2024 Palihapitiya cohosted a San Francisco fundraiser for [[Donald Trump|Trump]] with Sacks that reporting described as raising roughly 12 million dollars, and the All-In cohosts interviewed Trump on the podcast on June 20, 2024. Federal Election Commission records show Palihapitiya contributed to the 2024 effort to elect Trump. He had earlier held a passive minority stake in the Golden State Warriors, acquired around 2010 to 2011 for roughly 25 million dollars and sold in tranches in December 2021 and July 2022.[^16][^17][^18] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "How Canadian Facebook billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya plans to change the world." *The Globe and Mail,* 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/how-canadian-facebook-billionaire-chamath-palihapitiya-plans-to-change-the-world/article34109864/ +[^3]: Levy, Steven. "The Untold History of Facebook's Most Controversial Growth Tool." *Marker,* 2020. https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-most-controversial-growth-tool-2ea3bfeaaa66 +[^4]: "Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society." *Fortune,* December 12, 2017. https://fortune.com/2017/12/12/chamath-palihapitiya-facebook-society/ +[^5]: "Social Capital is no longer raising outside money." *Fortune,* June 19, 2018. https://fortune.com/2018/06/19/social-capital-departures/ +[^6]: "The mass exodus at Social Capital continues." *TechCrunch,* August 31, 2018. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/31/the-mass-exodus-at-social-capital-continues/ +[^7]: "Palihapitiya finds next '10x idea' with 4.8 billion dollar SPAC deal for Opendoor." *CNBC,* September 15, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/15/palihapitiya-finds-next-10x-idea-with-4point8-billion-spac-deal-for-real-estate-start-up-opendoor.html +[^8]: "Palihapitiya-backed Clover Health shares fall on critical report by short seller." *CNBC,* February 4, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/palihapitiya-backed-clover-health-shares-fall-on-critical-report-by-short-seller-.html +[^9]: "Chamath Palihapitiya's 14 SPAC and PIPE deals, tracking lifetime performance." *Benzinga,* March 2021. https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/03/20045351/chamath-palihapitiyas-14-spac-pipe-deals-tracking-lifetime-performance-and-the-past-weeks +[^10]: "Virgin Galactic drops 10% after chairman Chamath Palihapitiya dumps his 213 million dollar personal stake." *CNBC,* March 5, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/chamath-palihapitiya-sells-virgin-galactic-spce-stake.html +[^11]: "Palihapitiya-backed Clover Health shares fall on critical report by short seller." *CNBC,* February 4, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/palihapitiya-backed-clover-health-shares-fall-on-critical-report-by-short-seller-.html +[^12]: Clover Health Investments, Corp. Form 424B3 prospectus supplement, 2021. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001801170/000119312521029642/d120078d424b3.htm +[^13]: "Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya joins SPAC leaders facing lawsuits." *Crain's New York Business* (Bloomberg), June 2, 2023. https://www.crainsnewyork.com/finance/billionaire-chamath-palihapitiya-joins-spac-leaders-facing-lawsuits +[^14]: "Chamath Palihapitiya says 'nobody cares' about Uyghur genocide in China." *CNBC,* January 17, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/17/chamath-palihapitiya-says-nobody-cares-about-uyghur-genocide-in-china.html +[^15]: "Chamath Palihapitiya: Golden State Warriors distance themselves from co-owner over Uyghur comments." *CNN,* January 18, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/sport/chamath-palihapitiya-golden-state-warriors-uyghurs-spt-intl +[^16]: "All-In's bros explain how they got so rich and powerful." *Slate,* January 2023. https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/all-in-podcast-elon-musk-david-sacks-jason-calacanis-chamath-palihapitiya-david-friedberg.html +[^17]: "Two tech investors to host Trump at June San Francisco fundraiser." Reuters, 2024. https://www.aol.com/news/two-tech-investors-host-trump-195355695.html +[^18]: "Chamath Palihapitiya sells remaining Golden State Warriors stake." *Sportico,* July 2022. https://www.sportico.com/personalities/owners/2022/chamath-palihapitiya-sells-warriors-stake-1234680551/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/David Sacks.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/David Sacks.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..66962b02 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/David Sacks.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - DavidSacks + - PayPalMafia + - Yammer + - AllInPodcast + - Trump + - CryptoCzar +alias: + - David O. Sacks +summary: "David Sacks is a South African-born American entrepreneur and political figure who served as chief operating officer of PayPal, founded Yammer, cohosted the All-In Podcast, and was appointed White House AI and cryptocurrency czar under the second Trump administration." +born: 1972-05-25 +location: "Cape Town, South Africa (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +[[David Sacks|David Sacks]] (born May 25, 1972, in [[Cape Town|Cape Town]], [[South Africa|South Africa]]) is a [[PayPal Mafia|PayPal Mafia]] principal who served as chief operating officer of [[PayPal]], founded [[Yammer|Yammer]] (the enterprise social network, acquired by [[Microsoft|Microsoft]] in 2012 for 1.2 billion dollars), produced the film *[[Thank You for Smoking|Thank You for Smoking]]* (2005), and was appointed Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency (the "AI and crypto czar") under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. Sacks cohosted the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]], which became a media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period.[^1][^2] + +### The PayPal COO Role and the Post-PayPal Ventures + +Sacks served as chief operating officer at PayPal through the 2002 eBay acquisition, managing the company's operations alongside [[Peter Thiel|Thiel]] (chief executive) and [[Max Levchin|Levchin]] (chief technology officer). The COO role placed Sacks in operational control of the company's day-to-day execution during the period when the anti-fraud architecture was built and the PayPal Mafia cohort was formed. After the eBay sale, Sacks founded Yammer, the enterprise social network that applied consumer-social-networking patterns to corporate communications. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012.[^1] + +Sacks subsequently founded [[Craft Ventures|Craft Ventures]], a venture capital firm whose portfolio overlaps with the PayPal Mafia and Thiel-network commercial ecosystem. Sacks also produced the film *Thank You for Smoking* (2005), an adaptation of the [[Christopher Buckley|Christopher Buckley]] satirical novel about tobacco-industry lobbying.[^1] + +### The All-In Podcast and the Trump AI/Crypto Role + +The All-In Podcast, cohosted by Sacks with [[Chamath Palihapitiya|Chamath Palihapitiya]], [[Jason Calacanis|Jason Calacanis]], and [[David Friedberg|David Friedberg]], became a media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period. The podcast's audience overlaps with the [[Dialog]] invitation list and the [[Founders Fund|Founders Fund]] portfolio community. Sacks used the platform to advance the positions on AI regulation, cryptocurrency policy, and defense procurement that he subsequently entered the government to implement.[^2] + +In the second Trump administration, Sacks received the Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency appointment. The role covers federal AI policy, cryptocurrency regulation, and the broader technology-policy agenda. Sacks's appointment placed a PayPal Mafia principal in the executive branch with authority over the technology sectors that the Thiel-network commercial infrastructure operates in.[^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Sacks's PayPal COO role and the post-PayPal ventures, see the PayPal Mafia page and the contemporaneous Silicon Valley press. +[^2]: For the All-In Podcast and the Trump AI/crypto czar role, see the contemporaneous press coverage of the second Trump administration appointments. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Derek Parfit.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Derek Parfit.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..860bf6dc --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Derek Parfit.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - Utilitarianism + - Longtermism + - Oxford + - PopulationEthics + - PersonalIdentity +alias: + - Derek Parfit + - Derek Antony Parfit +summary: "Derek Parfit was an Oxford philosopher at All Souls College whose 1984 Reasons and Persons set out the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion, becoming a foundation of longtermism, and who lived with austere single-mindedness." +born: 1942-12-11 +died: 2017-01-02 +location: "Oxford, England" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Derek Antony Parfit (December 11, 1942 to January 2, 2017) was a British moral philosopher and a fellow of All Souls College, [[University of Oxford|Oxford]], whose 1984 book *Reasons and Persons* reshaped the philosophy of personal identity and population ethics. His treatment of obligations to future generations, including the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion, became a load-bearing part of the case for [[Longtermism|longtermism]], and his work is cited as foundational by [[Nick Bostrom]], [[Toby Ord]], and [[William MacAskill]].[^1][^2] + +### All Souls and an Ascetic Life + +Parfit was born in Chengdu, China, to British medical missionaries, educated at Eton, and read modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1964. He won a fellowship at All Souls College, the research-only Oxford college admitting a handful of fellows by examination, and it remained his academic home for the rest of his life, with visiting professorships at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers in his later decades. He married the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards in 2010, having met her in 1982.[^1][^3] + +His working life was famously austere. As Larissa MacFarquhar reported in a 2011 *New Yorker* profile, Parfit wore the same gray trousers and white shirt so as not to lose time choosing clothes, ate as little varied a diet as possible, and kept only one serious interest outside philosophy: photographing the same buildings in Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg year after year, then paying to have the images retouched toward an exacting ideal. He was a member of Giving What We Can and supported effective altruism, pledging to donate at least a tenth of his income. David Edmonds, whose 2023 biography *Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality* drew the fullest portrait of him, wrote that Parfit single-mindedly tried to rescue secular morality by arguing it has an objective rational basis, holding that if he could not show there are objective facts about right and wrong his life would be futile.[^4][^5] + +### Reasons and Persons + +*Reasons and Persons*, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, was organized in four parts addressing self-defeating ethical theories, rationality and time, personal identity, and future generations. Its third part advanced a reductionist or "bundle" account of personal identity, on which what matters in survival is psychological continuity and connectedness (Parfit's "Relation R") rather than a deep further fact of identity, a view he argued should loosen the grip of self-interest on practical reason. He drew on the work of [[Henry Sidgwick]], whose 1874 *The Methods of Ethics* he held to contain the largest number of true and important claims of any work in the history of ethics.[^2][^6] + +The fourth part, on future generations, introduced the non-identity problem: because policies and even the timing of a conception change which particular people come to exist, a choice that leaves future people worse off than others who might have existed harms no determinate person, since those worse-off people owe their very existence to the choice. Parfit's "depletion" example, in which present generations consume resources for a small near-term gain at the cost of distant welfare, showed that person-affecting moral views struggle to condemn outcomes most people find clearly wrong. He concluded that personal identity is in this respect irrelevant to ethics, pushing toward impersonal principles that weigh outcomes by their total value.[^7][^2] + +### The Repugnant Conclusion + +Within population ethics Parfit framed the Repugnant Conclusion, which he stated as the claim that "for any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living." Total utilitarianism, by valuing the sum of welfare, implies that a vast population with lives barely worth living can be better than a smaller flourishing one, and Parfit's "Mere Addition Paradox" traced a chain of individually plausible steps that lead there. He spent much of his later life searching, without final success, for a "Theory X" that would avoid the conclusion while preserving the impartial weighing of future lives.[^8][^2] + +Parfit's argument that future people count equally and could vastly outnumber the living, so that the value of the far future dominates moral calculation, was developed by Bostrom and Ord at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and MacAskill's 2022 *What We Owe the Future* drew its title and its core argument from Parfit's question of what the living owe to those who will exist. Parfit's final work, the multi-volume *On What Matters* (Oxford University Press, 2011 and 2017), argued that Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist ethics converge on the same moral truths, what he called the view that they are "climbing the same mountain."[^9][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Derek Parfit," British Academy memoir, on the 1942 Chengdu birth, the 2017 death, Eton, Balliol, the All Souls fellowship, and the visiting posts. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/memoirs/19/derek-parfit-1942-2017/ +[^2]: Parfit, Derek. *Reasons and Persons.* Oxford University Press, 1984. +[^3]: "Derek Parfit's quest for perfection," *New Statesman,* on the All Souls fellowship and the Venice and St. Petersburg photography. https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/06/derek-parfit-minds-eye-photographs-philosophy-narrative-projects +[^4]: MacFarquhar, Larissa. "How to Be Good," *The New Yorker,* September 5, 2011, on the gray trousers and white shirt, the minimal diet, and the photography as his one outside interest. https://www.stafforini.com/docs/MacFarquhar%20-%20How%20to%20be%20good.pdf +[^5]: Edmonds, David. *Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.* Princeton University Press, 2023; "Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality," Uehiro Oxford Institute, on the attempt to rescue secular morality on a rational basis. https://www.uehiro.ox.ac.uk/parfit-a-philosopher-and-his-mission-to-save-morality +[^6]: de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. *The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.* Oxford University Press, 2014, on Parfit's estimate of *The Methods of Ethics.* +[^7]: Parfit, Derek. "Future Generations: Further Problems," *Philosophy and Public Affairs,* on the depletion case and the non-identity problem. https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Future%20generations.pdf +[^8]: "The Repugnant Conclusion," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, quoting Parfit's formulation and the Mere Addition Paradox. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ +[^9]: Parfit, Derek. *On What Matters,* vols. 1 and 2. Oxford University Press, 2011; MacAskill, William. *What We Owe the Future.* Basic Books, 2022. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Eric Schmidt.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Eric Schmidt.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0415b334 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Eric Schmidt.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - EricSchmidt + - Google + - ArtificialIntelligence + - NationalSecurity + - Philanthropy +summary: "Eric Schmidt is the former Google chief executive turned billionaire investor and architect of US national-security artificial-intelligence policy, who chaired two Pentagon advisory bodies while privately funding the AI and defense startups those bodies promoted." +born: 1955-04-27 +location: "Atherton, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American engineer, billionaire investor, and former chief executive of [[Google]], whom he ran from 2001 to 2011 before serving as the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015 and executive chairman of its parent [[Alphabet]] from 2015 to 2017. After leaving Google's board in 2019 he reoriented his energy and fortune toward [[Artificial Intelligence]] investment and United States national-security technology policy, chairing the [[Defense Innovation Board]] and the [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]] while building a network of investment vehicles, the philanthropy [[Schmidt Futures]], and the think tank [[Special Competitive Studies Project]]. He coauthored two books on AI with the former secretary of state [[Henry Kissinger]].[^1][^2] + +### Google and the Fortune + +Schmidt took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at [[Sun Microsystems]] and ran the software firm Novell, then was recruited in 2001 by Google founders [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]] to provide what their investors at [[Kleiner Perkins]] and [[Sequoia Capital]] called "adult supervision." He served as chief executive through the company's 2004 initial public offering and its growth into the dominant search and advertising company in the world, stepping into the executive chairman role in 2011 when Page resumed the chief-executive title.[^1] + +The bulk of Schmidt's wealth derives from his roughly one-percent economic interest in Alphabet. According to a February 2025 securities filing he held about 49 million Alphabet Class A and Class B shares, and an analysis of company filings found he had collected roughly 7.9 billion dollars from sales of Google stock over the years. His net worth has been reported in a wide range depending on method and timing, commonly cited near 30 to 40 billion dollars and placed higher by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as Alphabet's share price climbed through 2025 and 2026.[^2] + +### The Pentagon Advisory Boards + +In March 2016 Defense Secretary [[Ash Carter]] appointed Schmidt to chair the newly created Defense Innovation Board, an advisory body bringing Silicon Valley figures to the Pentagon; he led it until 2020. The board's recommendations preceded the creation of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the department's adoption of agile software practices, and a set of AI ethical principles for the military. Schmidt remained a major holder of Alphabet stock throughout, and the [[Tech Transparency Project]] reported that his suggesting of technologies and vendors to the Pentagon stirred the concern of at least one government ethics official.[^3] + +In 2018 Schmidt was named chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally chartered body cochaired with the former deputy defense secretary [[Robert Work]], which ran until 2021. Its March 2021 final report concluded that the United States was not prepared to defend against or compete with [[China]] in AI and urged that the Defense Department and intelligence community become "AI-ready" by 2025. CNBC reported in October 2022 that roughly five months after his appointment Schmidt made a seed investment in an AI logistics startup named Beacon, the first of several direct investments in AI companies he made during his commission tenure, while continuing to hold billions of dollars in Alphabet stock; government ethics advisers told the network the arrangement presented a significant conflict of interest, though there was no indication he broke any rule.[^4][^5] + +### The Investment Vehicles + +Schmidt invests through several entities: the venture firm Innovation Endeavors, the earlier Tomorrow Ventures, and his family office Hillspire LLC, which manages his fortune and from which his AI startup investments have been tracked. CNBC reported in January 2025 that his family-office apparatus had backed 22 private AI firms since 2019. Among his national-security holdings is [[Rebellion Defense]], an AI defense-software company launched in 2019 with backing that included Innovation Endeavors.[^2][^3] + +His firms also hold positions in companies that profit from the emerging technologies he advocated to the government, including 5G and quantum computing, and he is executive chairman of the AI investment firm Steel Perlot. In 2021 Schmidt's foundation money helped seed America's Frontier Fund, a public-private investment vehicle modeled on the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] arm [[In-Q-Tel]] of the kind his own commission had recommended, run by the former In-Q-Tel chief executive Gilman Louie and staffed partly by former Schmidt Futures personnel. His charitable money also flowed toward China: while chairing the AI commission, his private foundation put nearly 17 million dollars into a fund feeding the Chinese private-equity group Hillhouse Capital, which holds an extensive portfolio of Chinese AI companies.[^3][^4] + +### The Anthropic Investment + +Schmidt was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], founded in 2021 by former [[OpenAI]] researchers from the [[Effective Altruism]] milieu. His name appears among the participants in Anthropic's first outside round, the 124-million-dollar Series A announced in May 2021 and led by the Estonian programmer [[Jaan Tallinn]], alongside [[Dustin Moskovitz]], the investor James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. The investment placed Schmidt in the company before the strategic stakes later taken by Google and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]] carried its valuation into the hundreds of billions of dollars.[^9] + +The Series A was a small fraction of Schmidt's broader AI footprint. Through Hillspire and Innovation Endeavors he accumulated positions across dozens of AI companies, and his backing of a safety-focused lab like Anthropic sat alongside investments in defense and logistics AI firms that sell to the government, several made while he chaired federal AI advisory bodies.[^2][^9] + +### The OSTP Salary Controversy + +A March 2022 Politico investigation by Alex Thompson reported that Schmidt Futures had quietly paid the salaries of staff working inside the White House [[Office of Science and Technology Policy]] under its director [[Eric Lander]], President [[Joe Biden]]'s science adviser. Schmidt Futures' chief innovation officer [[Tom Kalil]] remained on Schmidt's payroll for four months while serving ostensibly as an unpaid consultant at the office, and the philanthropy indirectly paid the salary of the office's chief of staff Marc Aidinoff for about six weeks. More than a dozen people in the roughly 140-person office had ties to Schmidt.[^6][^7] + +The arrangement alarmed the office's general counsel Rachel Wallace, who raised what reporting described as significant ethical concerns given Schmidt's financial interests in AI and other areas overlapping the office's work. Lander resigned in February 2022 after a separate Politico report found credible evidence he had bullied Wallace and violated workplace standards. Schmidt called the salary story "largely false," saying its thesis of undue influence over the office was "unsubstantiated."[^6][^7] + +### The Kissinger Books + +Schmidt coauthored two books with Kissinger framing AI as a force reshaping geopolitics and human self-understanding. *The Age of AI: And Our Human Future*, written with Kissinger and the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, was published in November 2021. Its central argument was that AI represents an epochal shift in human affairs comparable to the printing press and the Enlightenment.[^8] + +The sequel *Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit*, written with Kissinger and the former [[Microsoft]] research chief [[Craig Mundie]], was published by Little, Brown on November 19, 2024, nearly a year after Kissinger's death in November 2023 at age 100, making it the statesman's final book.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Eric Schmidt," Britannica, on his Princeton and Berkeley education, Sun Microsystems and Novell careers, recruitment to Google in 2001, the chief-executive tenure to 2011, and the executive-chairman roles at Google and Alphabet. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eric-Schmidt +[^2]: "Eric Schmidt's family office invests in 22 AI startups," CNBC, January 21, 2025, on the Hillspire family office, the 22 AI investments since 2019, the roughly 49 million Alphabet shares per a February 2025 filing, and the approximately 7.9 billion dollars collected from Google stock sales. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-invests-ai-startups.html +[^3]: "Eric Schmidt's Unseen Influence Over US Defense Spending," Tech Transparency Project, on the Defense Innovation Board chairmanship (2016-2020) under Ash Carter, the ethics-official concern over vendor suggestions, Innovation Endeavors, Tomorrow Ventures, Hillspire, the Rebellion Defense stake, and America's Frontier Fund. https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/eric-schmidts-unseen-influence-over-us-defense-spending +[^4]: "How Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt helped write A.I. laws in Washington without publicly disclosing investments in A.I. start-ups," CNBC, October 24, 2022, on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the Beacon seed investment five months after appointment, the direct AI startup investments during his tenure, and the nearly 17 million dollars into a Hillhouse-feeding fund. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-schmidt-helped-write-ai-laws-in-washington-without-publicly-disclosing-investments-in-ai-start-ups.html +[^5]: "National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: 2021 Final Report," NSCAI, March 2021, on the commission's 2018-2021 run, the Schmidt and Work cochairs, and the finding that the US must be AI-ready by 2025 to compete with China. https://www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report/ +[^6]: "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says story alleging his foundation indirectly paid White House science staffers is 'largely false,'" CNBC, March 29, 2022, on the Politico report, Tom Kalil's four months on the payroll as an unpaid consultant, the six weeks of Marc Aidinoff's salary, general counsel Rachel Wallace's concerns, and Schmidt's response. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-responds-to-white-house-related-allegations.html +[^7]: "How Eric Schmidt built an expansive AI influence operation," Politico (Alex Thompson), March 28, 2022, on the OSTP salary arrangements, Eric Lander's resignation in February 2022, and the dozen-plus Schmidt-tied staff in the 140-person office. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/28/google-eric-schmidt-white-house-00020712 +[^8]: "Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit," PR Newswire, on the November 19, 2024 Little, Brown publication with Kissinger and Craig Mundie as Kissinger's last book following his November 2023 death, and *The Age of AI* (2021) with Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/genesis-artificial-intelligence-hope-and-the-human-spirit-by-henry-a-kissinger-eric-schmidt-and-craig-mundie-302221817.html +[^9]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with participation from Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ilya Sutskever.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ilya Sutskever.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6ba4fe67 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ilya Sutskever.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - IlyaSutskever + - OpenAI + - SafeSuperintelligence + - ArtificialIntelligence + - DeepLearning + - AISafety +alias: + - Ilya +summary: "Ilya Sutskever is the deep-learning researcher who co-built AlexNet under Geoffrey Hinton, cofounded OpenAI as its chief scientist, voted to remove and then reinstate Sam Altman in the November 2023 board crisis, and left in May 2024 to cofound Safe Superintelligence." +born: 1986-12-08 +location: "Palo Alto, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Ilya Sutskever (born December 8, 1986) is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded [[OpenAI]] and served as its chief scientist until 2024, and who cofounded the lab [[Safe Superintelligence]] in June 2024. Born in Nizhny Novgorod in the [[Soviet Union]], he emigrated to [[Israel]] as a child and later to Canada, and took his doctorate at the [[University of Toronto]] under [[Geoffrey Hinton]], with whom he built the 2012 neural network AlexNet that is widely credited with igniting the modern deep-learning era. He was one of the directors who voted to fire OpenAI chief executive [[Sam Altman]] on November 17, 2023, then publicly reversed himself days later, and he departed the company in May 2024.[^1][^2] + +### From Hinton's Lab to Google to OpenAI + +Sutskever completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 2012, advised by Hinton. That year he, Hinton, and fellow graduate student Alex Krizhevsky built AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that won the ImageNet image-recognition competition by a wide margin and demonstrated that GPU-trained deep networks could outperform every competing approach. The three packaged the work into a company, DNNresearch, which [[Google]] acquired in 2013, bringing Sutskever to Google Brain, where he co-developed sequence-to-sequence learning, a method that applied deep networks to ordered data such as words and sentences and underpinned advances in machine translation.[^1][^2] + +In 2015 Sutskever left Google to become a cofounder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, recruited by Altman and [[Elon Musk]] into the nonprofit they launched that December with a billion-dollar funding pledge. Over the next several years he directed the research that produced the GPT family of large language models and, in late 2022, [[ChatGPT]]. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review interview he described his growing preoccupation with AI safety and alignment, saying that he had begun to spend much of his time on the problem of controlling systems far more capable than humans.[^2][^3] + +### The November 2023 Board Crisis + +On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, saying he had not been "consistently candid" in his communications with the directors. Sutskever was one of the four voting directors who ousted him, alongside [[Adam D'Angelo]], [[Tasha McCauley]], and [[Helen Toner]], the latter two tied to the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and he was reported to have delivered the news to Altman. The board's stated concern centered on the pace of commercialization relative to safety, and the episode was read across the industry as a clash between OpenAI's safety-focused governance and its commercial trajectory.[^4][^5] + +Within days the move collapsed. Roughly 700 OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to resign and follow Altman to [[Microsoft]], and on November 20 Sutskever signed that letter and posted on the platform X that he "deeply regret[ted]" his participation in the board's actions and would do everything he could to reunite the company. Altman was reinstated under a reconstituted board, and Sutskever lost his board seat while remaining an employee. He largely vanished from public view in the months that followed before announcing his departure on May 14, 2024, thanking the company and saying he was confident OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence that is "safe and beneficial."[^4][^5] + +### Safe Superintelligence + +In June 2024 Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a lab he cofounded with the investor and former Apple AI executive [[Daniel Gross]] and the former OpenAI researcher [[Daniel Levy]], declaring in a launch statement that the company had "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence" and that it would pursue that aim with no near-term commercial products to divert it. The company raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion-dollar valuation in September 2024, then a further 2 billion dollars at a 32-billion-dollar valuation reported in April 2025, with backers including [[Andreessen Horowitz]], Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alphabet, and Nvidia.[^6][^7] + +In June 2024 Meta Platforms attempted to acquire SSI; Sutskever rebuffed the approach, and Meta instead hired Gross, who left SSI on June 29, 2025 to join Meta's superintelligence division. Sutskever, who had been a cofounder, then became chief executive of SSI, with Levy as president, writing that the company would remain independent: "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence."[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Ilya Sutskever: From Hinton's Lab to OpenAI," LinkedIn, on AlexNet, DNNresearch, the Google acquisition, and sequence-to-sequence learning. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-ilya-sutskever-before-during-after-co-founding-openai-joshi-xhc9f +[^2]: "OpenAI's chief scientist thinks humans could one day merge with machines," *MIT Technology Review,* October 26, 2023, on Sutskever's biography, the AlexNet work with Hinton and Krizhevsky, and his focus on AI safety. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/26/1082398/exclusive-ilya-sutskever-openais-chief-scientist-on-his-hopes-and-fears-for-the-future-of-ai/ +[^3]: "OpenAI launches as a nonprofit with a billion-dollar pledge," IEEE Spectrum, December 11, 2015, on the founding and Sutskever's role as chief scientist. https://spectrum.ieee.org/billiondollar-nonprofit-ai-research-lab-to-open-in-san-francisco +[^4]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023, on the board vote, the four directors, and the "not consistently candid" statement. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained +[^5]: "Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company," reporting on the November 20, 2023 regret post, the employee letter, and the May 14, 2024 departure. *CNBC,* May 14, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/14/ilya-sutskever-openai-co-founder-and-chief-scientist-is-leaving.html +[^6]: "Safe Superintelligence Inc.," company launch statement, June 2024, on the "one goal and one product" mission and the cofounders. https://ssi.inc/ +[^7]: "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B," *TechCrunch,* April 12, 2025, on the 1-billion September 2024 round at a 5-billion valuation, the 2-billion round at a 32-billion valuation, and the investor roster. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b +[^8]: "Ilya Sutskever is CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta hired Gross," *CNBC,* July 3, 2025, on the failed Meta acquisition, Gross's June 29 departure, and Sutskever becoming CEO with Levy as president. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/J. Philippe Rushton.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/J. Philippe Rushton.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..64ce3c04 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/J. Philippe Rushton.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - RaceScience + - PioneerFund + - Eugenics + - HumanBiodiversity + - Psychology +alias: + - John Philippe Rushton + - Jean-Philippe Rushton +summary: "J. Philippe Rushton was a British-Canadian psychologist at the University of Western Ontario and president of the Pioneer Fund whose book Race, Evolution, and Behavior applied r/K selection theory to claim a racial hierarchy of intelligence and behavior, work the scientific community condemned as racist and methodologically flawed." +born: 1943-12-03 +died: 2012-10-02 +location: "London, Ontario, Canada" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +J. Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 to October 2, 2012) was a British-Canadian psychologist at the [[University of Western Ontario]] who became the most prominent academic exponent of a ranked racial hierarchy in intelligence, behavior, and reproduction, and who led the [[Pioneer Fund]] from 2002 until his death. His 1995 book *Race, Evolution, and Behavior* applied [[r/K selection theory]] from population biology to human races, claiming that Asians, whites, and blacks fall on a fixed evolutionary continuum. The scientific community rejected the work as racist and methodologically flawed, and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classified him as a promoter of scientific racism.[^1][^2] + +### Race, Evolution, and Behavior + +Rushton argued that the three groups he labeled "Mongoloid," "Caucasoid," and "Negroid" differ in a suite of traits including brain size, intelligence, sexual behavior, family stability, and reproductive rate, with Asians and blacks at opposite ends and whites in between. He cast blacks as the most "r-selected," presenting them as more fertile, more impulsive, and less intelligent, and Asians as the most "K-selected." To support these claims he ran a paid survey on sexual behavior at Toronto's [[Eaton Centre]] shopping mall, paying respondents to answer questions about genital size and sexual habits, work for which the University of Western Ontario censured him for proceeding without ethics-board approval.[^2][^3] + +[[Transaction Publishers]] issued the book in 1995 and a condensed "Special Abridged Edition" in 1999, and in 2000 the publisher mass-mailed thousands of free copies of the abridged version to academics, drawing organized protest from sociologists and a public reversal in which Transaction withdrew the book and apologized. Rushton thereafter published the abridged edition through the Pioneer Fund's own [[Charles Darwin Research Institute]] and distributed it widely to social scientists and journalists, and he promoted the racial-hierarchy thesis at the white-nationalist [[American Renaissance]] conferences run by [[Jared Taylor]].[^3][^7] + +### The 1989 Controversy + +Rushton presented his racial theories at a 1989 meeting of the [[American Association for the Advancement of Science]], whose officials publicly called his research "highly suspect." Ontario premier [[David Peterson]] denounced him, the Ontario Provincial Police investigated, the [[Ontario Human Rights Commission]] examined his conduct, and the geneticist [[David Suzuki]] challenged him to a public debate. The provincial attorney-general Ian Scott declined to prosecute, calling the theories "loony but not criminal." The university kept him on but reprimanded him over the unapproved research.[^2][^4] + +The Suzuki debate took place before a packed hall at the University of Western Ontario in 1989, with Suzuki declaring, "There will always be Rushtons in the world. We must be prepared to root them out." Ontario premier Peterson called for Rushton's dismissal, and the police investigated whether his lectures violated Canada's hate-speech provisions under the Criminal Code before Scott's office declined to proceed. The university defended his academic freedom while condemning the content of his work, and for a period after the furor disrupted his classes Rushton delivered his lectures by videotape.[^4][^8] + +### Pioneer Fund Presidency + +Rushton received more than a million dollars in Pioneer Fund grants over his career, money he used in part to buy out his teaching duties, and in 2002 he became president of the fund, the [[Wickliffe Draper|Draper]]-founded foundation that has financed race-and-intelligence research since 1937. He served until shortly before his death, when he nominated the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]] as his successor. His r/K framework and his collaborations with Lynn appeared in the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]], and his work supplied citations for [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and for the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] network associated with [[Steve Sailer]].[^1][^5] + +Born in Bournemouth, England in 1943, Rushton took a doctorate from the [[London School of Economics]] in 1973, taught at [[York University]] and the [[University of Toronto]], and moved to Western Ontario, where he was made full professor in 1985. After Harry Weyher's death he became Pioneer Fund president in 2002 and channeled much of the fund's money to his own Charles Darwin Research Institute in Port Huron, [[Michigan]]; tax records show that the institute received $473,835 in 2002, roughly 73 percent of the fund's grants that year. He died of cancer in London, Ontario, on October 2, 2012.[^1][^9] + +### Scientific Condemnation + +Reviewers across psychology and biology dismissed *Race, Evolution, and Behavior*. The University of Washington psychologist [[David Barash]] wrote that "bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page" of the book. In 2020 the psychology department at the University of Western Ontario issued a statement saying much of Rushton's research "was racist," was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint," and showed how "the impact of flawed science lingers on." By 2021 several of his articles had been retracted as scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable.[^2][^6] + +In June 2020 the journal *[[Personality and Individual Differences]]* retracted a 2012 paper Rushton coauthored with [[Donald Templer]] that linked skin pigmentation to aggression and sexuality, and in December 2020 the journal *Psychological Reports* retracted two further Rushton papers from 1990 and 1991 on race and brain size, with the notice citing a misunderstanding of human genetic variation, the inappropriate application of ecological theory to human populations, the misuse of heritability, and the failure to replicate his findings. The wave of retractions reflected a broader reckoning across psychology with hereditarian work funded by the Pioneer Fund.[^6][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Philippe Rushton, professor who pushed limits with race studies, dead at 68," *The Globe and Mail,* October 2012, on his birth in Bournemouth, his Western Ontario career, the Pioneer Fund presidency, and his racial claims. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/philippe-rushton-professor-who-pushed-limits-with-race-studies-dead-at-68/article4901806/ +[^2]: "Jean-Philippe Rushton," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on his theories, the Pioneer Fund, and the scientific-racism classification. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/jean-philippe-rushton/ +[^3]: Rushton, J. Philippe. *Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective.* Transaction Publishers, 1995. +[^4]: "Leading race 'scientist' dies in Canada," *Salon,* October 6, 2012, on the 1989 AAAS controversy, the Eaton Centre survey, and the Ontario investigations. https://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/leading_race_scientist_dies_in_canada/ +[^5]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Rushton becoming Pioneer Fund president. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2002/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund +[^6]: "Psychology journal retracts two articles for being unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda," Retraction Watch, December 29, 2020, on the *Psychological Reports* retractions of Rushton's 1990 and 1991 brain-size papers and the June 2020 *Personality and Individual Differences* retraction of the 2012 Rushton-Templer paper. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/29/psychology-journal-retracts-two-articles-for-being-unethical-scientifically-flawed-and-based-on-racist-ideas-and-agenda +[^7]: "Jean-Philippe Rushton," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the abridged edition mailed in bulk to academics around 2000, his American Renaissance appearances, and the Charles Darwin Research Institute. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/jean-philippe-rushton/ +[^8]: "Leading race 'scientist' dies in Canada," *Salon,* October 6, 2012, on the 1989 Suzuki debate, the "root them out" quote, and Rushton teaching by videotape. https://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/leading_race_scientist_dies_in_canada/ +[^9]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Rushton's LSE doctorate, his Western Ontario career, the 2002 presidency, and the $473,835 routed to his Charles Darwin Research Institute. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund/ +[^10]: "Journal retracts paper linking skin color to aggression and sexuality," Retraction Watch, June 2020, on the retraction of the 2012 Rushton-Templer paper in *Personality and Individual Differences.* https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/29/psychology-journal-retracts-two-articles-for-being-unethical-scientifically-flawed-and-based-on-racist-ideas-and-agenda diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jared Polis.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jared Polis.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..92823b9a --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jared Polis.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - JaredPolis + - DemocraticParty + - Colorado + - Governor + - TechEntrepreneur + - Cryptocurrency + - Dialog +alias: + - Jared Schutz Polis + - Governor Jared Polis +summary: "Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado, the first openly gay person elected a U.S. governor, a technology entrepreneur who founded ProFlowers and cofounded Techstars, and a name on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society." +born: 1975-05-12 +location: "Boulder, Colorado (born); Colorado (political base)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jared Schutz Polis (born May 12, 1975, in [[Boulder, Colorado|Boulder]], [[Colorado]]) is an American politician and technology entrepreneur who served in the [[United States House of Representatives]] from 2009 to 2019 and has been governor of Colorado since January 2019, the first openly gay man elected governor of a U.S. state. In June 2026 Polis was named by *WIRED* among the figures surfaced in the leak of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]]. Polis built a fortune in internet commerce before entering politics and has used the governorship to position Colorado as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Entrepreneurial Fortune + +Polis grew up partly in [[La Jolla]], California, and earned a degree in politics from [[Princeton University]]. His parents, Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz, founded the greeting-card company [[Blue Mountain Arts]]; Polis built its online arm, Blue Mountain Arts.com, which sold to [[Excite@Home]] in 1999 in a cash-and-stock deal reported at roughly 780 million dollars. He went on to found the online florist [[ProFlowers]], which went public and was later sold in a transaction valued at around 477 million dollars.[^2][^3] + +In 2006 Polis cofounded the startup accelerator [[Techstars]] in Boulder with [[David Cohen]], [[Brad Feld]], and David Brown, one of the earliest and most influential American accelerator programs. His commercial record placed him among the wealthiest members of Congress when he was elected, and he financed much of his own political activity, having earlier won a seat on the [[Colorado State Board of Education]].[^2][^3] + +### Congress and the Governorship + +Polis was elected to the U.S. House from Colorado's 2nd congressional district in 2008 and served from January 2009 to January 2019, aligning with the progressive wing of the [[Democratic Party]] on education and civil-rights issues while pursuing technology and internet-freedom causes. In 2018 he won the Colorado governorship, becoming the first openly gay man and the first [[Jewish people|Jewish]] person elected governor of the state, and he was reelected in 2022.[^2][^4] + +In office Polis pursued a self-styled libertarian-tinged Democratic agenda, including aggressive moves on income-tax reduction and a deregulatory posture on emerging technologies. His administration's embrace of digital and blockchain technology became a defining policy signature, building on positions he had taken in Congress.[^4][^5] + +### Cryptocurrency Policy + +Polis has a long record of cryptocurrency engagement. In 2014, as a member of Congress, he became the first federal lawmaker to accept campaign donations in [[Bitcoin]], and in 2016 he cofounded the Congressional Blockchain Caucus. As governor he announced that Colorado would accept cryptocurrency, either Bitcoin or [[Ethereum]], for state tax and fee payments beginning in the summer of 2022, the first U.S. state to do so, with plans to extend the option to services such as driver's license renewals and hunting and fishing licenses.[^5] + +Polis structured the program so the state would not hold crypto reserves: a payment processor converts the digital assets to U.S. dollars before they enter the state treasury, functioning like a credit-card layer. He characterized the move as practical rather than ideological, calling crypto acceptance "frankly not as exciting as it sounds. It's a basic convenience thing," and projected that only about one percent of residents would use it initially.[^5] + +### The 2026 Dialog Leak + +The June 16, 2026 *WIRED* report identified Polis on the Dialog roster as "Governor of Colorado," listing him among the political figures surfaced when the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] located a member directory in the source code of Dialog's website and a separate source provided the publication with the 222-name registration list for the society's retreat near [[Dublin]], scheduled for August 12 through 16, 2026. *WIRED* placed Polis alongside [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]] and [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]] among the elected officials on the list.[^1] + +A spokesperson for Polis disputed any membership, saying the governor "does not know why his name is associated with the organization in any way or appeared on their website." The denial did not address whether Polis had attended any Dialog event, and it left unexplained the presence of his name in the records crimew pulled from the site's code.[^1][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Profile: Entrepreneur Jared Polis sees governor's race as a chance to turn good ideas into reality." *Colorado Springs Gazette,* September 30, 2018. https://gazette.com/2018/09/30/profile-entrepreneur-jared-polis-sees-governors-race-as-a-chance-to-turn-good-ideas-into-reality-af2d0222-c1b2-11e8-8b2b-afa916b3b182/ +[^3]: "Congressman Jared Polis: Before TechStars Were Stars." *Startup Grind.* https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/congressman-jared-polis-before-techstars-were-stars/ +[^4]: "Jared Polis: what to know about Colorado's Democratic governor." *Colorado Public Radio,* October 17, 2022. https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/vg-2022-colorado-governor-race-jared-polis-democrat/ +[^5]: "Colorado's governor wants to be a haven for crypto as a 'basic convenience thing.'" *Associated Press / AOL,* 2022. https://www.aol.com/colorados-governor-wants-haven-crypto-130752609.html +[^6]: Statement of a spokesperson for Governor Jared Polis, quoted in "What is Peter Thiel's secret 'Dialog' society and how it got exposed after website leak." *The Express Tribune,* June 2026. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2614092/what-is-peter-thiels-secret-dialog-society-and-how-it-got-exposed-after-website-leak diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jes Staley.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jes Staley.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c9c9d796 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jes Staley.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +category: "Organized Crime" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - JPMorgan + - Barclays + - Banking + - JesStaley + - FinancialConductAuthority + - PrivateBanking +alias: + - James Edward Staley + - James E. Staley +summary: "Career JPMorgan banker who managed Jeffrey Epstein's private-banking relationship, later became Barclays chief executive, and was banned from senior UK finance roles in 2023 for misleading the regulator about the nature and timing of his Epstein relationship." +born: 1956-12-27 +location: "Boston, Massachusetts" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +James Edward Staley is an American banker who spent more than three decades at [[JPMorgan Chase]], rose to run its asset management and then its investment bank, and served as group chief executive of [[Barclays]] from December 2015 until November 2021. During his JPMorgan years he was the senior executive who managed and advocated for the bank's relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]], a private-banking client from 1998 to 2013. In October 2023 the [[Financial Conduct Authority]] banned Staley from holding senior management functions in UK financial services and fined him for recklessly approving a letter that misled the regulator about his relationship with Epstein, a decision the [[Upper Tribunal]] upheld in June 2025.[^1][^2][^3] + +### JPMorgan Career + +Staley joined Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin College, and spent the 1980s in the bank's Latin America division, including as head of corporate finance for Brazil and as general manager of the firm's Brazilian brokerage.[^4] He led [[JPMorgan Asset Management]] from 2001 to 2009 and then ran the corporate and investment bank from 2009 to 2013.[^5] At the height of his JPMorgan career he was discussed as a potential successor to chief executive [[Jamie Dimon]].[^4] + +Staley managed the private-banking relationship between JPMorgan and Epstein, who became a client of the bank's private bank in 1998.[^6] In a July 2011 email, JPMorgan general counsel [[Stephen Cutler]] wrote to Staley and asset-and-wealth-management head [[Mary Erdoes]] that Epstein was "not an honorable person in any way" and "should not be a client," and Cutler later testified that Staley and Erdoes made the decision to keep Epstein.[^6] Epstein also functioned as a source of referrals and introductions for Staley and the bank, including to wealthy potential clients.[^7] + +In 2013 Staley left JPMorgan after more than 30 years to become a managing partner at the hedge fund [[BlueMountain Capital]].[^4] JPMorgan terminated its banking relationship with Epstein the same year.[^6] After BlueMountain, Staley was recruited to lead Barclays, joining as group chief executive on December 1, 2015.[^5] + +### Epstein Emails and the 2015 Island Visit + +Court filings in litigation brought against JPMorgan by the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]] disclosed that Staley exchanged roughly 1,200 emails with Epstein from his JPMorgan account between 2008 and 2012.[^7] In a message dated November 1, 2009, sent from Epstein while Epstein was serving his Florida sentence, Epstein wrote, "I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound."[^7] In a 2010 exchange Staley wrote "That was fun. Say hi to Snow White," and when Epstein asked "what character would you like next," Staley answered "Beauty and the Beast"; Staley later said he had no recollection of the messages.[^7] + +Staley and his family visited Epstein's private island, [[Little Saint James]] in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], on more than one occasion.[^7] After an April 2015 visit, which Staley described as his last in-person meeting with Epstein, Staley emailed Epstein, "Thanks for the flight and thanks for the lunch. Your place is crazy, and special ... I count u as a deep friend. The girls seemed to enjoy the sail. All the best Jes."[^8] The April 2015 trip occurred months before Staley was named Barclays chief executive in October 2015.[^8] + +JPMorgan filed a third-party complaint against Staley in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York]] on March 9, 2023, within the Virgin Islands action.[^9] The complaint asserted indemnification, contribution, breach of fiduciary duty, and "faithless servant" claims, alleging Staley concealed his personal activities with Epstein, and sought to recover compensation paid to him from at least 2006 through 2013.[^9] Staley moved to dismiss, arguing JPMorgan was using him as a "shield" for the bank's own failures.[^10] + +### Barclays and the FCA Ban + +While Barclays chief executive, Staley was separately sanctioned for attempting to identify a whistleblower who had sent letters criticizing a senior Barclays hire; in 2018 the FCA and the [[Prudential Regulation Authority]] fined him 642,430 pounds and Barclays cut his pay.[^11] Staley remained chief executive until November 2021, when he resigned as the FCA and PRA conclusions about his Epstein relationship became known.[^2] + +The FCA's case centered on an October 2019 letter that Barclays sent to the regulator, which Staley approved, stating that he "did not have a close relationship" with Epstein and had "ceased contact" with Epstein before joining Barclays.[^1] The FCA found those statements misleading, citing emails in which Staley described Epstein as one of his "deepest" and "most cherished" friends, and evidence that Staley was in contact with Epstein in the days before his Barclays appointment was announced on October 28, 2015, and indirectly in 2016 and 2017.[^1] On October 12, 2023 the FCA issued a decision banning Staley from senior management functions and imposing a fine of about 1.8 million pounds, with the penalties suspended pending his appeal.[^1] + +The Upper Tribunal heard Staley's reference and, on June 26, 2025, dismissed it and upheld the prohibition, finding that he had acted recklessly and with a lack of integrity and that the evidence of his Epstein relationship was "overwhelming."[^3] The tribunal reduced the financial penalty from about 1.8 million pounds to 1.1 million pounds, reflecting deferred Barclays shares that he forfeited.[^3] During the proceedings Staley testified that he had a sexual encounter with a member of Epstein's staff years earlier, and he maintained that he had not been dishonest.[^12] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "FCA fines former Barclays CEO and bans him from senior roles," *Central Banking,* 2023. https://www.centralbanking.com/regulation/banking/7959957/fca-fines-former-barclays-ceo-and-bans-him-from-senior-roles +[^2]: "FCA: Staley misled regulators about his relationship with Epstein," *Banking Dive,* 2023. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/fca-staley-misled-regulators-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/733373/ +[^3]: "Upper Tribunal upholds Jes Staley ban," Financial Conduct Authority, 2025. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/upper-tribunal-upholds-jes-staley-ban +[^4]: "Jes Staley," Bank Policy Institute, accessed 2026. https://bpi.com/people/jes-staley/ +[^5]: "James E. Staley appointed Group Chief Executive," Barclays PLC, October 28, 2015. https://home.barclays/content/dam/home-barclays/documents/news/2015/october/281015_RNS.pdf +[^6]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/ +[^7]: "Lawsuit alleges Jeffrey Epstein sent JPMorgan Chase exec photos of young women," *CNN Business,* 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/epstein-jpmorgan-emails +[^8]: "High flyer to pariah: the saga of Epstein-linked banker Jes Staley," *inkl / Agence France-Presse,* 2025. https://www.inkl.com/news/high-flyer-to-pariah-the-saga-of-epstein-linked-banker-jes-staley +[^9]: "JPMorgan Sues Ex-Executive Associated With Jeffrey Epstein," *Time,* 2023. https://time.com/6261243/jpmorgan-lawsuit-jes-staley-epstein-trafficking/ +[^10]: "Jes Staley Says JPMorgan Using Him as 'Shield' for Epstein Failures," *U.S. News & World Report / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-04-24/jes-staley-seeks-to-dismiss-jpmorgan-chase-lawsuit-over-jeffrey-epstein +[^11]: "Ex-Barclays CEO Staley's lifetime FCA ban to remain," *Banking Dive,* 2025. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/jes-staley-fca-lifetime-ban-banking-epstein-barclays-uk/751754/ +[^12]: "Former Barclays CEO Jes Staley slept with Epstein assistant, court hears," *Yahoo / PA Media,* 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-barclays-ceo-jes-staley-181703399.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/John Schulman.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/John Schulman.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4978eedf --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/John Schulman.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - JohnSchulman + - OpenAI + - Anthropic + - ThinkingMachinesLab + - ArtificialIntelligence + - ReinforcementLearning +summary: "John Schulman is an OpenAI cofounder and reinforcement-learning researcher who created the PPO algorithm, helped build ChatGPT and the RLHF alignment behind it, left OpenAI for Anthropic in August 2024, and then cofounded Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +John Schulman is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded [[OpenAI]] in 2015, where he helped develop reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and led the creation of [[ChatGPT]], and who is regarded as one of the principal architects of the alignment methods that made conversational language models usable. He left OpenAI for [[Anthropic]] in August 2024, departed Anthropic roughly six months later, and in February 2025 became a cofounder and chief scientist of [[Thinking Machines Lab]], the company founded by the former OpenAI chief technology officer [[Mira Murati]].[^1][^2] + +### Reinforcement Learning and the Road to OpenAI + +Schulman studied physics at Caltech, briefly pursued neuroscience, and took his doctorate in computer science at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], advised by Pieter Abbeel, working on robotics and reinforcement learning. During and shortly after his PhD he developed two foundational reinforcement-learning algorithms: Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with coauthors including Sergey Levine and Michael Jordan, and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), published in 2017, which simplified TRPO while preserving its stability and became one of the most widely used and most cited methods in the field.[^3][^4] + +He joined OpenAI as a member of its founding team in 2015, immediately after finishing at Berkeley. PPO later became the workhorse algorithm of RLHF, the technique that fine-tunes a language model on human preference judgments to make its outputs more helpful and less harmful, and which OpenAI used to turn its raw GPT models into the aligned systems that culminated in ChatGPT. Schulman co-led OpenAI's post-training team and is widely credited as a leader of the effort that produced ChatGPT after its November 2022 release.[^4][^5] + +### Anthropic, Then Thinking Machines Lab + +On August 5, 2024 Schulman announced that he was leaving OpenAI to join Anthropic, the rival lab founded by former OpenAI researchers around AI safety. He wrote that the move "stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work," and he joined Anthropic's alignment-science team. His departure came amid a wave of exits from OpenAI's safety and research leadership, including the chief scientist [[Ilya Sutskever]] and Murati.[^1][^6] + +Schulman's time at Anthropic was brief. In February 2025 he left to cofound Thinking Machines Lab with Murati, taking the role of chief scientist, in a company assembled largely from former OpenAI researchers including Barret Zoph and Bob McGrew. The lab raised a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion-dollar valuation in July 2025, led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], with Schulman among its named cofounders.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman Departs for AI Rival Anthropic," *Bloomberg,* August 6, 2024, on the August 2024 move and the "deepen my focus on AI alignment" statement. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-departs-for-ai-rival-anthropic +[^2]: "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," *Fortune,* February 6, 2025, on his Anthropic departure and joining Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic +[^3]: "Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms," Schulman et al., 2017, the PPO paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06347 +[^4]: "Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO): The Key to LLM Alignment," Cameron R. Wolfe, on Schulman's Caltech and Berkeley training under Abbeel, the TRPO and PPO work, and PPO's role in RLHF. https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/proximal-policy-optimization-ppo +[^5]: "How John Schulman Created OpenAI," KITRUM, on his joining the OpenAI founding team in 2015, leading the creation of ChatGPT, and co-leading the post-training team. https://kitrum.com/blog/the-inspiring-story-john-schulman-co-founder-of-openai/ +[^6]: "OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joins rival LLM developer Anthropic," SiliconANGLE, August 6, 2024, on the move and the broader departures from OpenAI. https://siliconangle.com/2024/08/06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-joins-rival-llm-developer-anthropic/ +[^7]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round," *TechCrunch,* July 15, 2025, on the seed round, valuation, and the cofounders including Schulman. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Julian Savulescu.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Julian Savulescu.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..304abb05 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Julian Savulescu.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - Bioethics + - Transhumanism + - HumanEnhancement + - Oxford + - EffectiveAltruism +alias: + - Julian Savulescu +summary: "Julian Savulescu is an Oxford bioethicist who founded the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, edited the Journal of Medical Ethics, and advanced 'procreative beneficence' and the case for human genetic and moral enhancement." +born: 1963 +location: "Oxford, England; Singapore" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Julian Savulescu (born 1963) is an Australian bioethicist who held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the [[University of Oxford]] and founded its [[Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics|Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics]]. He is best known for the principle of "procreative beneficence," which holds that prospective parents have a moral reason to select the children expected to have the best lives, and for his advocacy, with Ingmar Persson, of biomedical moral enhancement. He trained under Peter Singer and then Derek Parfit before founding his own program in applied ethics at the [[Effective Altruism|effective-altruism]]-adjacent Oxford centers.[^1][^2] + +### From Singer and Parfit to the Uehiro Chair + +Savulescu studied medicine at Monash University in [[Melbourne]] before completing a doctorate under [[Peter Singer]] on ethical questions in end-of-life care. As a Sir Robert Menzies Medical Scholar he moved to Oxford between 1994 and 1997 to work under [[Derek Parfit]]. He thus passed directly through the two figures who carried classical utilitarianism into late-twentieth-century moral philosophy before establishing his own program in applied ethics.[^1][^3] + +In 2002 he was appointed to the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, endowed by the Japanese philanthropist Eiji Uehiro, and in 2003 he founded and directed the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, which was renamed the Uehiro Oxford Institute in 2024. He served as editor-in-chief of the *Journal of Medical Ethics*, the leading English-language bioethics journal, and from August 2022 also held the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professorship in Medical Ethics and directed the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore.[^1] + +### Procreative Beneficence + +In "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children," published in the journal *Bioethics* in 2001, Savulescu argued that when couples using in-vitro fertilization can choose among embryos, they have a moral obligation to select, on the available genetic information, the child expected to have the best prospects for a good life, including non-disease traits such as temperament or intelligence. He defended the principle as following from a general duty to do the most good and distinguished it from coercive state eugenics by locating the choice with parents.[^4] + +Critics charged that procreative beneficence revived eugenic reasoning by treating some lives as preferable to bring into existence than others and that the appeal to "best life prospects" smuggled contested social judgments into reproductive medicine. Savulescu extended the position across later work on embryo selection, gene editing, and what he termed liberal eugenics, arguing that enhancement technologies should be permitted where they improve expected welfare without coercion.[^4][^5] + +### Human and Moral Enhancement + +Savulescu was a leading academic proponent of human enhancement, the use of biotechnology to extend human physical, cognitive, and emotional capacities beyond the species norm. In 2009 he and [[Nick Bostrom]] co-edited the volume *Human Enhancement* (Oxford University Press), bringing the Uehiro Centre's bioethics together with the transhumanist program of Bostrom's [[Future of Humanity Institute]], the two Oxford centers that became the institutional base for radical-enhancement and existential-risk research.[^6] + +In *Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement* (Oxford University Press, 2012), written with the Swedish philosopher Ingmar Persson, Savulescu argued that human moral psychology evolved for small groups and is now mismatched against globalized technology capable of "ultimate harm," such as engineered pandemics, climate collapse, or weapons that could end the species. They concluded that traditional moral education would work too slowly and that researchers should investigate biomedical means of enhancing human moral motivation. The framing of technology-driven extinction risk overlapped with the existential-risk agenda that [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]], who emerged from the same Oxford practical-ethics environment and co-founded [[Giving What We Can]] in 2009, later built into longtermism.[^7][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Professor Julian Savulescu," Uehiro Oxford Institute, on the Uehiro Chair, the founding of the Oxford Uehiro Centre in 2003 and its 2024 renaming, the *Journal of Medical Ethics* editorship, and the National University of Singapore appointment. https://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-julian-savulescu +[^2]: "Training Transhumanists at Oxford University," Europe in the World, University of Notre Dame, on the Future of Humanity Institute, the Uehiro Centre, procreative beneficence, and human enhancement. https://eitw.nd.edu/articles/training-transhumanists-at-oxford-university/ +[^3]: "Julian Savulescu," Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, on the doctorate under Peter Singer and the Menzies scholarship at Oxford under Derek Parfit. https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cbme/people_uri/julian-savulescu-bioethics/ +[^4]: Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children." *Bioethics,* vol. 15, no. 5-6, 2001. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12058767/ +[^5]: "Interview with Julian Savulescu on Genetic Selection and Enhancement," Practical Ethics (University of Oxford blog), 2019. https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2019/11/interview-with-julian-savulescu-on-genetic-selection-and-enhancement/ +[^6]: Bostrom, Nick, and Julian Savulescu, eds. *Human Enhancement.* Oxford University Press, 2009. +[^7]: Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. *Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement.* Oxford University Press, 2012, on the mismatch between human moral nature and "ultimate harm." https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unfit-for-the-future-9780199653645 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Leo Strauss.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Leo Strauss.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3c05a48d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Leo Strauss.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - LeoStrauss + - PoliticalPhilosophy + - Esotericism + - Neoconservatism + - PeterThiel +alias: + - Leo Strauss + - Strauss +summary: "Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing, critique of liberal modernity, and revival of the ancients shaped American neoconservatism and supplied one of the three pillars of Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'" +born: 1899-09-20 +died: 1973-10-18 +location: "Kirchhain, Germany; Chicago, Illinois" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 to October 18, 1973) was a German-born political philosopher who taught for nearly two decades at the [[University of Chicago]] and who founded the school of interpretation known as Straussianism. His central claims were that the great philosophers of the past practiced esoteric writing, concealing a dangerous teaching beneath a salutary surface; that modern liberal philosophy represents a decline from classical political philosophy; and that the conflict between reason and revelation, which he called the theological-political problem, is the permanent theme of Western thought. His students and their students became a recognizable presence in American conservatism, and his name attaches to the intellectual genealogy of [[Neoconservatism|neoconservatism]]. [[Peter Thiel]] titled his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment" after him.[^1][^2] + +### Life and Career + +Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, into an observant Jewish family, and studied at the [[University of Marburg]] and the University of Hamburg, taking his doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on the epistemology of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi supervised by the neo-Kantian philosopher [[Ernst Cassirer]]. In the early 1920s he attended the Freiburg lectures of [[Edmund Husserl]] and encountered the early work of [[Martin Heidegger]], whom he regarded for the rest of his life as the most formidable thinker of the age. He worked at the Academy for Jewish Research in Berlin, where he edited part of the jubilee edition of [[Moses Mendelssohn]], and published his first book, *Spinoza's Critique of Religion*, in 1930.[^1][^3] + +In 1932 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship took Strauss out of Germany to France and then England, and he never returned; the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 made his exile permanent. He completed *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* in England, emigrated to the United States in 1937, and from 1938 to 1948 taught at the [[New School for Social Research]] in New York. In 1949 he joined the University of Chicago, where he was Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor and taught until 1967, the period in which he trained the bulk of his students and produced his major interpretive works. He spent a year at Claremont Men's College in 1968 and then moved to [[St. John's College]] in Annapolis as scholar in residence, where he died in 1973.[^1][^3] + +### Esoteric Writing and Persecution + +Strauss's most distinctive doctrine, set out in *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), holds that under conditions of persecution philosophers learned to write on two levels at once. The surface, or exoteric, teaching conformed to the moral and religious opinions of the city and protected the author from reprisal, while a hidden, or esoteric, teaching, addressed to careful readers and signaled by deliberate contradictions, omissions, and errors, communicated the philosopher's real and potentially subversive thought. Strauss developed the reading through studies of [[Maimonides]], Judah Halevi, and Spinoza, arguing that modern scholars had lost the very art of reading "between the lines" that earlier readers took for granted.[^4][^5] + +Behind the contingent fact of persecution Strauss placed a permanent tension between philosophy and the political community. Philosophy questions the authoritative opinions on which any society rests, and so the pursuit of truth is always potentially corrosive of the beliefs that hold a city together. The classical solution, in Strauss's account, was a politic reticence: the philosopher tempers the public expression of the truth and grants the city the salutary myths it requires, a posture connected to the Platonic notion of the noble lie, the gennaion pseudos of the *Republic*, the medicinal falsehood the rulers tell for the good of the whole. Critics, notably Shadia Drury in *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss* (1988), read this as an esoteric endorsement of rule by a deceiving elite, a reading Strauss's defenders dispute.[^4][^6] + +### The Critique of Modernity + +Strauss argued that classical political philosophy, oriented by an idea of the naturally best regime and the question of how one ought to live, was abandoned by modern thought in favor of lower but supposedly more solid foundations. In *Natural Right and History* (1953) he traced the collapse of the classical doctrine of natural right into modern natural rights and then into the historicism and value-relativism he regarded as the characteristic disease of the twentieth century, a relativism he thought left liberal democracy defenseless against its enemies. He described modernity as unfolding in "three waves," the first beginning with [[Niccolo Machiavelli|Machiavelli]] and [[Thomas Hobbes|Hobbes]], the second with [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], the third with [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], each lowering the horizon further until thought arrived at the nihilism he associated with Heidegger.[^2][^7] + +The recovery he proposed was a return to the ancients, achieved by reading Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers on their own terms rather than through the assumptions of progress. Works such as *On Tyranny* (1948), a commentary on Xenophon's *Hiero* that occasioned his published exchange with the Hegelian [[Alexandre Kojeve]], *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958), and *The City and Man* (1964) enacted this return. Underlying all of it was what Strauss called the theological-political problem, the unresolved quarrel between the claims of reason ("Athens") and the claims of revelation ("Jerusalem"), which he held no philosophy had ever refuted and which he treated as the animating tension of the Western tradition.[^7][^8] + +### The Schmitt Exchange + +In 1932 Strauss published "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," a close and critical review of the jurist [[Carl Schmitt]]'s book. Strauss argued that Schmitt, in seeking to ground the political in the friend-enemy distinction and to escape the liberalism he attacked, in fact remained within the liberal horizon he wished to overcome, because he could give no positive account of why the political was worth affirming. Schmitt privately praised the review as the one penetrating response his book had received, revised passages of the third edition in light of it, and supplied a recommendation that supported Strauss's Rockefeller fellowship.[^9] + +The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed this episode in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (German 1988, English 1995), arguing that the exchange concerned, beneath its ostensible subject, the deeper quarrel between political philosophy and political theology. Thiel set the two thinkers' names side by side in "The Straussian Moment."[^9][^10] + +### Students, Neoconservatism, and the Straussian Moment + +Strauss trained a large cohort of students at Chicago, among them Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield (at Harvard), Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, and a later generation including the analyst [[Paul Wolfowitz]] and the journalist William Kristol moved into government and the policy press, which is why commentators traced a line from Strauss to the foreign policy of the [[George W. Bush]] administration, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Strauss's own writing addressed no policy questions. The "Straussian" reading also split into rival camps, an East Coast school around Mansfield and an interpretively bolder West Coast school around Jaffa and the [[Claremont Institute]], which became influential on the [[Trump]]-era right.[^2][^11] + +Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," published in *Politics and Apocalypse* (2007), takes Strauss as one of three twentieth-century thinkers, with Schmitt and [[Rene Girard]], who saw past the optimistic anthropology of Enlightenment liberalism. Thiel reads the [[September 11 attacks]] as evidence that the Hobbesian and Lockean account of human beings as fearful, economically motivated, and threatened only by recognized states had failed, and he invokes Strauss's distinction between the exoteric surface and the esoteric core to argue that the modern state conceals its hardest necessities, a logic he extends to covert intelligence and to the surveillance work of his company [[Palantir]]. The essay treats the Straussian recovery of the ancients as possibly the last and best resource of the West while voicing the suspicion, drawn from Girard, that even the Straussian moment of triumph may prove brief.[^12][^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the Kirchhain birth, the 1921 Hamburg doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, Husserl and Heidegger, the Berlin and New School years, and the Chicago career. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/ +[^2]: "Leo Strauss," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Straussianism, the critique of modernity, and the disputed line to neoconservatism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Strauss +[^3]: Strauss, Leo. *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* (1930); *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* (1936). +[^4]: Strauss, Leo. *Persecution and the Art of Writing.* Free Press, 1952. +[^5]: "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing," *The Review of Politics,* Cambridge, on the strong and weak accounts of esotericism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/morality-nature-and-esotericism-in-leo-strausss-persecution-and-the-art-of-writing/AE252D909A9FE588A1ADED672DFA6C0F +[^6]: Drury, Shadia B. *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.* St. Martin's Press, 1988. See also Drury, "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss," *Political Theory* 13, no. 3 (1985). +[^7]: Strauss, Leo. *Natural Right and History.* University of Chicago Press, 1953; and "The Three Waves of Modernity," in *An Introduction to Political Philosophy* (1989). +[^8]: Strauss, Leo. *On Tyranny* (1948, rev. ed. with the Kojève exchange 1963); *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958); *The City and Man* (1964). +[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932), reprinted in *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* and in Meier's volume below; on Schmitt's June 1932 praise and the third-edition revisions. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/ +[^10]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax. University of Chicago Press, 1995. +[^11]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* rejecting the claim that Strauss is responsible for Iraq-war policy and noting his work "does not concern policy issues of any sort." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/ +[^12]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007, pp. 189 to 218. +[^13]: "Peter Thiel's The Straussian Moment Explained," summary of the essay's use of Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard, the September 11 framing, and the esoteric concealment argument. https://vistasofinsight.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-the-straussian-moment diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Martin Nowak.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Martin Nowak.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ecb5c55a --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Martin Nowak.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - JeffreyEpstein + - Harvard + - SciencePhilanthropy + - EvolutionaryDynamics + - MathematicalBiology +alias: + - Martin Nowak + - Martin A. Nowak +summary: "Martin Nowak is a Harvard mathematical biologist who directed the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Jeffrey Epstein helped establish with a 2003 gift, and whom Harvard sanctioned in 2021 for hosting Epstein on campus after his 2008 conviction." +born: 1965-04-07 +location: "Cambridge, Massachusetts" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Martin A. Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is an Austrian-born mathematical biologist at [[Harvard University]] who directed the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) from its founding in 2003. The program was established with help from a $6.5 million gift from [[Jeffrey Epstein]], the largest single donation Epstein made to Harvard, and a 2020 university report found that Nowak gave Epstein an office and campus access used for more than forty visits after Epstein's 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Harvard sanctioned Nowak in 2021.[^1][^2] + +### Mathematical Biology at Harvard + +Nowak trained in biochemistry and mathematics at the University of Vienna before working at the University of Oxford and the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] in Princeton. He joined Harvard in 2003 as professor of mathematics and biology and became the founding director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which applied mathematical models to evolution, cooperation, cancer, and the dynamics of infectious disease. His books include *Evolutionary Dynamics* (Harvard University Press, 2006) and *SuperCooperators* (Free Press, 2011).[^3][^1] + +Nowak's central research concerns the evolution of cooperation, set out in his 2006 *Science* paper "Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation," which catalogued kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection as the mechanisms by which natural selection can favor cooperative behavior. In a 2010 *Nature* paper, "The Evolution of Eusociality," Nowak with [[Corina Tarnita]] and the biologist [[E. O. Wilson]] challenged the dominance of inclusive-fitness theory, prompting a rebuttal signed by more than 130 biologists.[^8][^9] + +The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was created in 2003 under Harvard President [[Lawrence Summers]] following a proposal that, according to Harvard's later review, originated with Epstein and the mathematician [[Benedict Gross]]. Epstein told *Vanity Fair* that he had been reluctant to attach his name to the program and that Summers persuaded him to fund it. The program operated out of an office suite at One Brattle Square in Harvard Square rather than on the main campus.[^2][^4] + +### Epstein's Donations and Campus Access + +A review of Harvard's ties to Epstein, commissioned by President [[Lawrence Bacow]] in September 2019 and released on May 1, 2020, found that Epstein gave Harvard $9,179,000 across 22 gifts between 1998 and 2008, of which the $6.5 million for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics in 2003 was the largest. The review was conducted by the Office of the General Counsel under [[Diane Lopez]] with the law firm [[Foley Hoag]], drew on more than 250,000 pages of documents, and interviewed over forty people. It found that Harvard stopped accepting Epstein gifts after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, with the decision to halt gifts made under President [[Drew Faust]] between 2007 and 2008, though Epstein gave $736,000 after his 2006 arrest but before the conviction.[^2][^5] + +Epstein held a formal Harvard appointment as a visiting fellow in the psychology department for the 2005 to 2006 academic year, secured through department chair [[Stephen Kosslyn]] despite Epstein's lacking the doctoral degree the position normally required; Epstein reapplied for 2006 to 2007 but withdrew after his September 2006 arrest. The report found that Epstein retained a dedicated office at PED, identified as Office 610 and known internally as "Jeffrey's Office," to which he brought his own rug and hung his own photographs, with keycard and passcode access and a Harvard telephone line that remained until 2017.[^2][^5] + +The report found that Epstein visited the program more than forty times between 2010 and 2018, including six visits in 2018, often accompanied by young women in their twenties described as assistants. It found that Nowak approved posting on the PED website in 2014 a webpage featuring Epstein's photograph, biography, and charitable links under a tab labeled "Friends," on which Epstein was the only entry, and that the review described the program's account of Epstein's support as "flattering and false." Summers, former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean [[Henry Rosovsky]], and law professor [[Alan Dershowitz]] were among those recorded as attending PED events.[^2][^6] + +### Sanctions and Aftermath + +On March 26, 2021, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [[Claudine Gay]] announced that Nowak had violated several university policies and imposed sanctions: he was barred for two years from serving as principal investigator on new grants, prohibited for two years from taking on new undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral advisees, and allowed to continue teaching undergraduate courses. Harvard announced that the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics would be closed and that Nowak's research would move into the mathematics department. Nowak had been placed on paid administrative leave in May 2020.[^1][^6] + +Harvard reported that it had identified $200,937 in unspent Epstein funds, which it pledged to direct to organizations supporting victims of human trafficking, and stated it would not accept future gifts from Epstein or his estate. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences lifted the sanctions in 2023, restoring Nowak's research and advising privileges in March of that year.[^2][^7] + +### The 2026 Files and Renewed Leave + +In February 2026 the journal *Nature* reported, drawing on U.S. Department of Justice files, that Epstein's involvement with Nowak's work ran deeper than the 2020 review had described, including that Epstein reviewed page proofs of the 2010 eusociality paper and gave advice on responding to its critics. Nowak's name appears more than 8,000 times in the released files. *Nature* also reported that in 2009 Epstein routed scholarship money through Corina Tarnita, then Nowak's PhD student, to two young women studying mathematics at the University of Iași in Romania; Tarnita, by then at [[Princeton University]], told *Nature* the payments were legitimate scholarships and that she wished she had never known Epstein.[^10][^11] + +A March 10, 2014 email chain published from the files showed Nowak writing to Epstein that "our spy was captured after completing her mission," to which Epstein replied "did you torture her." Nowak later said on his website that the line came from the video game *Civilization II*, where the response signals a successful operation. The files also showed that an Epstein assistant arranged 2014 travel for Nowak and a female Harvard graduate student to Epstein's Caribbean island.[^12][^11] + +On February 25, 2026, Harvard placed Nowak on paid administrative leave a second time, with FAS Dean [[Hopi Hoekstra]] citing new information from the released Department of Justice documents. In April 2026 Nowak resigned from the [[Austrian Academy of Sciences]] amid the renewed scrutiny.[^7][^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Gay Levies Sanctions Against Prof. Nowak for Contacts With Jeffrey Epstein," *The Harvard Crimson,* March 26, 2021, on the $6.5 million PED gift, the 40-plus visits, the sanctions, the program closure, and the May 2020 leave. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/26/gay-sanctions-nowak-epstein/ +[^2]: "Harvard Asked Its Lawyers to Review the University's Ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Here's What They Found," *The Harvard Crimson,* May 2, 2020, on the $9,179,000 in 22 gifts from 1998 to 2008, Office 610 with keycard access, the telephone line to 2017, the visit count, the unspent $200,937, and the halt on gifts. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/2/harvard-concludes-epstein-review/ +[^3]: Nowak, Martin A. *Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life.* Harvard University Press, 2006. +[^4]: "Why did Jeffrey Epstein cultivate famous scientists?," *Scientific American,* 2019, on the establishment of PED under Summers and Epstein's account to Vanity Fair. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-did-jeffrey-epstein-cultivate-famous-scientists/ +[^5]: "Report Concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's Connections to Harvard University," Harvard University Office of the General Counsel, May 2020, on the donation totals, the establishment of PED, and the gift policy. https://ogc.harvard.edu/file_url/208 +[^6]: "Martin Nowak Sanctioned for Jeffrey Epstein Involvement," *Harvard Magazine,* March 2021, on the policy violations, the website descriptions, and the terms of the sanctions. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/03/martin-nowak-sanctioned-for-jeffrey-epstein-involvement +[^7]: "Harvard Places Math Professor Martin Nowak on Paid Administrative Leave Over Epstein Ties," *The Harvard Crimson,* February 25, 2026, on the 2023 restoration and the renewed leave. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/25/nowak-leave-epstein/ +[^8]: Nowak, Martin A. "Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation," *Science* 314, no. 5805 (2006): 1560-1563, on kin selection, direct and indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1133755 +[^9]: Nowak, Martin A., Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson. "The Evolution of Eusociality," *Nature* 466 (2010): 1057-1062, the paper that drew a rebuttal signed by more than 130 biologists. +[^10]: "Martin Nowak Placed on Leave a Second Time," *Harvard Magazine,* February 2026, on the Nature reporting, the page-proof advice on the eusociality paper, the 2014 island travel, and the second leave announced February 27, 2026. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/martin-nowak-harvard-administrative-leave-epstein +[^11]: "Did you torture her?: Emails of Jeffrey Epstein and Martin Nowak reveal shocking details," *WION,* February 2026, on the Romanian scholarships routed through Tarnita, the Iasi students, and the island travel for Nowak and a graduate student. https://www.wionews.com/photos/-did-you-torture-her-emails-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-martin-nowak-reveal-shocking-details-all-about-6-5-million-to-harvard-and-private-travels-1770656438037 +[^12]: "Professor Corina Tarnita on the Epstein Files: 'I Wish I Had Never Known Him'," *Princeton Alumni Weekly,* 2026, on the March 10, 2014 "spy"/"torture" email exchange, Nowak's Civilization II explanation, and Tarnita's account of the scholarships. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/professor-corina-tarnita-epstein-files-i-wish-i-had-never-known-him +[^13]: "Harvard Professor Martin Nowak Resigns From Austrian Academy Amid Epstein Scrutiny," *The Harvard Crimson,* April 2, 2026, on Nowak's resignation from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/2/nowak-austrian-academy-resignation/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Maximilian Snyder.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Maximilian Snyder.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ff2a9b8f --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Maximilian Snyder.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +category: "Extremism & Violent Networks" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Violence + - DeathPenalty + - Vallejo +alias: + - Maximilian Bentley Snyder +summary: "Maximilian Snyder is a former University of Oxford student connected to the Zizian group who was charged with the January 2025 capital murder of Vallejo landlord Curtis Lind, allegedly to prevent Lind from testifying against other members of the group." +location: "Vallejo, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Maximilian Bentley Snyder is a young man connected to the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group who was charged with the January 17, 2025 murder of [[Curtis Lind]], an 82-year-old [[Vallejo]] landlord, in a killing that [[Solano County]] prosecutors allege was carried out to stop Lind from testifying against other members of the group. Snyder studied philosophy and computer science at the [[University of Oxford]] from 2020 to 2024.[^1][^2] + +### The Lind Killing and Prosecution + +Lind had survived a 2022 sword attack by Zizian-affiliated tenants and was scheduled to testify in April 2025 against [[Suri Dao]] and [[Alexander Leatham]], the two charged in that attack. On January 17, 2025, Lind was stabbed to death on his Lemon Street property; prosecutors charged Snyder with murder and alleged the killing was meant to prevent his testimony. Snyder pleaded not guilty to capital murder in March 2025 and was held without bail at the Solano County Jail in Fairfield, with prosecutors indicating he could face the death penalty under California law.[^1][^3] + +The complaint charged a special circumstance, alleging that "the victim, C.L., was a witness to a crime" who "was intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding," the statutory basis for a capital case. Snyder was arrested on January 24, 2025 by Redding Police Department officers and transported to the Solano County Jail. He hummed and sang to himself during his arraignment, behavior reporters noted from the courtroom, and his case moved slowly through 2025 as he returned to court in June to set a date for a preliminary hearing.[^1][^3][^4] + +### The Youngblut Marriage License + +Snyder had applied for a marriage license with [[Teresa Youngblut]], the member charged in the January 20, 2025 killing of Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]] in [[Vermont]]. The application was made in Washington in November 2024, and Snyder and Youngblut had both attended Lakeside School, a private high school in [[Seattle]]. The marriage-license record was one of the first documented links investigators drew between the California and Vermont killings.[^4][^5] + +Federal prosecutors in Vermont said Youngblut had been in contact with Snyder, placing the two killings, Lind's on January 17 and Maland's on January 20, within a single network operating across the country in the same week. The Oxford background set Snyder among the highly educated recruits who populated the group; he had studied philosophy and computer science there from 2020 to 2024 before the Vallejo killing put him in custody. By early 2026 he was one of at least seven people associated with the group fighting charges across three states.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "22-year-old University of Oxford grad charged with murder of elderly landlord," *The Tab,* March 7, 2025. https://thetab.com/2025/03/07/22-year-old-university-of-oxford-grad-charged-with-murder-of-elderly-landlord +[^2]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/ +[^3]: "Defendant linked to 'Zizians' pleads not guilty to capital murder," *Open Vallejo,* March 26, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/26/defendant-linked-to-zizians-pleads-not-guilty-to-capital-murder/ +[^4]: "Suspects in killings of Vermont border patrol agent and California man connected by marriage license, extreme ideology," *VTDigger,* January 27, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/01/27/suspects-in-killings-of-vermont-border-patrol-agent-and-california-man-connected-by-marriage-license-extreme-ideology/ +[^5]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025; on the November 2024 marriage-license application and the Youngblut contact. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^6]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike Solana.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike Solana.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fc8ee8fa --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike Solana.md @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - MikeSolana + - FoundersFund + - PirateWires + - Hereticon + - PeterThiel + - Media +summary: "Mike Solana is a Founders Fund executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication Pirate Wires, who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and serves as the organizer of the Hereticon 'conference for thoughtcrime' and the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Mike Solana is a [[Founders Fund]] executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication [[Pirate Wires]], who has worked with [[Peter Thiel]] for more than ten years. Solana holds three documented positions within the Thiel network: chief marketing officer of Founders Fund (formerly vice president), founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires (the media arm), and organizer of [[Hereticon]] (the "conference for thoughtcrime"). Across the three roles he operates the media-and-propaganda layer of the Thiel Influence Network, distinct from the commercial layer (the Founders Fund portfolio) and the convening layer ([[Dialog]] and Hereticon).[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Founders Fund Role + +Solana's senior position at Founders Fund places him inside the operational core of the Thiel commercial network. His official title has evolved from vice president to chief marketing officer, and his tenure spans more than ten years of working directly with Peter Thiel. The *Founders Fund* team page lists him as CMO, and his role encompasses the firm's external communications, the *Anatomy of Next* podcast that Founders Fund produces, and the programming for Hereticon. The CMO role at a venture firm is structurally the position that controls the public framing of the firm's thesis, which in Founders Fund's case is the *[[Zero to One]]* monopoly-and-defense argument.[^1] + +The Founders Fund podcast *Anatomy of Next* has published Hereticon sessions including "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel revisiting his 1995 essay *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The podcast functions as the audio-distribution channel for the conference programming that Solana curates, and the cross-publication (the podcast releasing sessions from the private conference) carries the Hereticon content to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees.[^1] + +### Pirate Wires and the Media Layer + +Pirate Wires is the media outlet Solana founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, originally launched on Substack and later migrated to its own domain at piratewires.com. The publication covers the intersection of technology, politics, and culture from the Thiel-network perspective and has positioned itself as the in-house media voice of the Founders Fund network. Solana's own Substack bio describes him self-mockingly as "billionaire media tycoon and mayor of san francisco," a posture consistent with the publication's bombastic editorial register.[^3][^4] + +The launch mission statement, published as "Welcome to Pirate Wires," declared the outlet "an American media company writing at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture." *The Atlantic* profiled Solana in October 2024 as "The Most Opinionated Man in America," describing him as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading among what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. The *Digg* coverage of the launch characterized Pirate Wires as a "Founders Fund-backed media franchise" intended to replace the traditional venture-capital communication model (the polite TechCrunch launch piece) with direct ideological combat.[^3][^4][^6] + +The media-layer function is distinct from the convening function. Pirate Wires produces the public framing of the Thiel-network positions on tech-policy questions (deplatforming, content moderation, AI regulation, defense procurement) and distributes that framing through a subscription model that reaches a broader audience than the Dialog or Hereticon invitation lists. The Solana *Reason* interview (May 2022) laid out the editorial posture directly: Solana argued that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse, and the framing has structured Pirate Wires' subsequent coverage. The publication has run pieces defending portfolio companies and network principals under media scrutiny, including the "Substack Billionaire" piece defending [[Coinbase]] against *New York Times* coverage, and the recurring editorial line tracks the Founders Fund commercial and political positions across defense tech, cryptocurrency, and the anti-regulation frame.[^2][^3] + +### Hereticon and the Convening Layer + +Solana is the organizer and public face of Hereticon, the Founders Fund conference self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, with programming spanning immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, defense-technology ethics, and ideological heterodoxy. The *Reason* interview with Solana around the inaugural event covered the deliberate privacy of the venue, the refusal of press access, and the framing of the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums.[^1][^5] + +Solana's role across the three positions (Founders Fund CMO, Pirate Wires editor, Hereticon organizer) places a single individual in control of the firm's public communications, the media outlet that frames its positions, and the private conference that convenes the principals. The *Anatomy of Next* podcast, which Solana also controls, distributes selected Hereticon sessions to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees, including the "Apocalypse Ball" session and the Thiel session revisiting *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The cross-publication carries the private conference's content into the public layer that Pirate Wires serves, and the combination of the three properties constitutes an integrated media-and-convening operation under a single editor.[^1] + +### The Atlantic Profile and the Public Persona + +*The Atlantic* profile (October 2024) is the most detailed public record on Solana's role and worldview. The profile describes him as the public-facing voice of the Thiel network's positions on culture-war and tech-policy questions, positioned against what he frames as a captured mainstream institutional press. The profile documents the relationship between Pirate Wires' editorial line and the Founders Fund portfolio interests (defense tech, cryptocurrency, anti-regulation), and the recurring pattern in which the outlet's positions track the commercial and political positions of the network whose media arm it is.[^3] + +The profile's framing of Solana as "not an obvious fit for Founders Fund" when he joined documents the career trajectory: a humanities-and-media background figure who entered the venture firm and built the media infrastructure around it rather than building a portfolio of investments. The trajectory is the inverse of the [[Blake Masters]] or [[JD Vance]] pattern (operatives placed into electoral politics from inside the commercial orbit); Solana was placed into the commercial orbit to build its media arm, and the *Atlantic* profile is the document of that role.[^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Founders Fund. "Michael Solana" team page. https://foundersfund.com/team/michael-solana/ ; Founders Fund. "Anatomy of Next" podcast, Hereticon episodes. https://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/ +[^2]: "Mike Solana Wants You To Commit Thoughtcrimes." *Reason,* May 15, 2022. https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commit-thoughtcrimes/ +[^3]: "The Most Opinionated Man in America." *The Atlantic,* October 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/ +[^4]: "Mike Solana, Pirate Wires editor-in-chief, launches a Founders Fund-backed media franchise." *Digg,* 2022. https://digg.com/tech/r5s3pf8h +[^5]: "Peter Thiel's VC Firm Founders Fund Announces Hereticon." *Business Insider,* October 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-vc-firm-founders-fund-hereticon-conference-immortality-ufo-2019-10 +[^6]: Pirate Wires. "Welcome to Pirate Wires" launch post. https://www.piratewires.com/p/welcome-to-pirate-wires ; "Substack Billionaire." *Pirate Wires.* https://www.piratewires.com/p/substack-billionaire diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Nick Szabo.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Nick Szabo.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d95eb3c3 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Nick Szabo.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - NickSzabo + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - SmartContracts + - Bitcoin + - DigitalCash +alias: + - Nicholas Szabo +summary: "Nick Szabo is a computer scientist and legal scholar who proposed the digital-cash scheme bit gold, coined the concept of smart contracts, and is recurrently and consistently denied to be Satoshi Nakamoto." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Nick Szabo is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and legal scholar associated with the [[Cypherpunks]] movement who designed several of the conceptual building blocks of cryptocurrency. He coined the term "smart contract" in the 1990s, proposed the digital-cash scheme "bit gold" that prefigured [[Bitcoin]], and wrote the essay "The God Protocols." He is among the most frequently named candidates for the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator [[Satoshi Nakamoto]], a claim he has consistently denied.[^1][^2] + +### Smart Contracts + +Szabo studied computer science at the [[University of Washington]] and later took a law degree from [[George Washington University]]. In the mid-1990s he introduced the idea of the smart contract, a self-executing agreement whose terms are written directly into code so that obligations are enforced automatically without a trusted intermediary, set out in his 1996 paper "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets." The concept later became foundational to blockchain platforms such as [[Ethereum]].[^1][^3] + +Szabo's canonical illustration was the vending machine, which he called "the primitive ancestor of smart contracts": a device that takes in coins and dispenses product and change through a mechanism that enforces the bargain within a loss limited to the cash in the till. He developed the idea formally in "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks," published in First Monday in September 1997, which set out four contractual objectives that cryptographic protocols could secure: observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability. His skepticism toward trusted intermediaries was shaped by roughly six months consulting for [[David Chaum]]'s DigiCash in Amsterdam, where he concluded that the centralized design, which let the operator alter balances, was a fatal flaw and pushed him toward decentralized money.[^7][^8] + +### The God Protocols and Bit Gold + +In his 1997 essay "The God Protocols," Szabo imagined an ideal trusted third party, a hypothetical deity to whom parties could hand their inputs and receive correct outputs, and asked how far cryptography could approximate that ideal without an actual trusted party. He first described "bit gold" in the late 1990s and expanded it in a 2005 blog post, proposing a scarce digital asset produced through proof-of-work and chained cryptographically so that it could be created, transferred, and verified online with minimal trust, mirroring the properties of physical gold. Bit gold was a direct conceptual precursor to Bitcoin, alongside [[Hal Finney]]'s reusable proof-of-work and [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money.[^3][^4] + +In the bit gold design, set out on his Unenumerated blog in December 2005, a participant generated a proof-of-work string from a challenge, had it securely timestamped, and entered it in a distributed property title registry, with the last string created supplying the challenge bits for the next so that the records formed an unforgeable chain of title. Szabo grounded the scheme in the argument of his 2002 essay "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money," which held that money began with "collectibles" whose value rested on "unforgeably costly" production, the same property bit gold sought to recreate digitally. He flagged in advance the design's central weakness, that hidden advances in computer architecture could create undetected supply gluts, and located the title registry's security in the Byzantine quorum scheme of his 1998 essay "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority."[^9][^10] + +### Satoshi Speculation + +A 2014 linguistic study comparing eleven candidates against the Bitcoin white paper found Szabo's writing the closest match, with its lead researcher Jack Grieve calling the similarities "uncanny." In May 2015 the journalist [[Nathaniel Popper]] named Szabo as a leading Satoshi candidate in the *New York Times,* reporting that many Bitcoin insiders considered him the most likely author; Szabo replied "I'm not Satoshi." He has repeatedly rejected the attribution, writing in 2014 that "you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi." Popper's book *Digital Gold* (2015) examined the case at length, and later documentary and press investigations through 2026 named various suspects without conclusive proof.[^2][^5][^6] + +The circumstantial case against Szabo rests on more than stylometry. He had spent more than a decade designing the exact components Bitcoin assembled, his April 2008 blog request for help coding bit gold came months before the white paper appeared in October 2008, and bit gold went undeployed even after Bitcoin proved the design worked, which some read as the behavior of a creator who had moved on under a pseudonym. Szabo has pointed to the absence of any documentary link, and the stylometric finding was never published in a peer-reviewed venue, leaving the attribution unproven. The 2024 HBO documentary "Money Electric" instead named the developer Peter Todd, who denied it, and no court filing or release through 2026 has resolved the question.[^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Notable Crypto Personalities: Nick Szabo," *The Block,* on his career, smart contracts, and bit gold. https://www.theblock.co/profile/350036/nick-szabo +[^2]: "Satoshi Files: Nick Szabo," *CoinMarketCap,* on the Satoshi speculation, the linguistic study, and Szabo's denials. https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/satoshi-files-nick-szabo +[^3]: Szabo, Nick. "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets," 1996; "The God Protocols," 1997; "Bit Gold," 2005. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html +[^4]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on bit gold and the cypherpunk precursors of Bitcoin. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^5]: "What's in a Name: Linguistic Study Identifies Nick Szabo as the Real Satoshi Nakamoto," *Cointelegraph,* on the Grieve study. https://cointelegraph.com/news/what_s_in_a_name_linguistic_study_identifies_nick_szabo_as_the_real_satoshi_nakamoto +[^6]: Popper, Nathaniel. *Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.* Harper, 2015; and "Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto," *New York Times,* 15 May 2015. +[^7]: Szabo, Nick. "The Idea of Smart Contracts," 1997, on the vending machine as the primitive ancestor of smart contracts. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-idea-of-smart-contracts/ +[^8]: Szabo, Nick. "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks," *First Monday,* vol. 2, no. 9, 1 September 1997. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548 Van Wirdum, Aaron. "The Genesis Files: With Bit Gold, Szabo Was Inches Away From Inventing Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* July 12, 2018, on his DigiCash consulting. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-bit-gold-szabo-was-inches-away-inventing-bitcoin +[^9]: Szabo, Nick. "Bit Gold," Unenumerated, December 29, 2005. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html +[^10]: Szabo, Nick. "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money," 2002, https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/; and "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority," 1998, on the Byzantine quorum title registry. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/secure-property-titles/ +[^11]: Van Wirdum, Aaron. "The Genesis Files: With Bit Gold, Szabo Was Inches Away From Inventing Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* July 12, 2018, on the April 2008 coding request and the undeployed design; and "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," HBO, October 2024, naming Peter Todd, who denied it. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-bit-gold-szabo-was-inches-away-inventing-bitcoin diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Peter Singer.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Peter Singer.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..44c87b3d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Peter Singer.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - Utilitarianism + - EffectiveAltruism + - AnimalRights + - Bioethics + - Princeton +alias: + - Peter Singer + - Peter Albert David Singer +summary: "Peter Singer is an Australian utilitarian philosopher at Princeton whose 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' and its drowning-child argument became the founding text of effective altruism, and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975." +born: 1946-07-06 +location: "Princeton, New Jersey; Melbourne, Australia" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Peter Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, long the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at [[Princeton University]], whose utilitarian arguments for aiding the global poor and for the moral status of animals made him one of the most widely read and most protested philosophers of the late twentieth century. His 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and its drowning-child thought experiment are routinely cited as the founding text of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and he keynoted the movement's 2013 summit.[^1][^2] + +### Education and Career + +Singer was born in [[Melbourne]] to Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled Vienna after the 1938 Nazi annexation of [[Austria]]; three of his grandparents died in the Holocaust, and his maternal grandfather, the classicist David Ernst Oppenheim, was murdered at Theresienstadt. He took a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1969 at the [[University of Melbourne]], the latter on the thesis "Why Should I Be Moral?", then a BPhil at [[University of Oxford|Oxford]] in 1971 under R. M. Hare. He held a Radcliffe lectureship at University College, Oxford, and a visiting post at New York University before returning to Australia.[^3] + +At Monash University he twice chaired the philosophy department and founded the Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1999 he was appointed the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, a post he held until his final lecture in 2023. His applied work in *Practical Ethics* (1979) extended utilitarian reasoning to abortion, euthanasia, severe infant disability, and the treatment of animals, and his stated positions on infanticide in cases of severe disability drew organized protests in Germany and Switzerland in 1989 and 1990 and a public campaign against his Princeton appointment, with the publisher Steve Forbes withdrawing donations to the university.[^3][^4] + +### Famine, Affluence, and Morality + +"Famine, Affluence, and Morality," published in *Philosophy and Public Affairs* in 1972, argued from a single premise: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." Singer illustrated it with a child drowning in a shallow pond: a passerby who could wade in and save the child at the cost only of muddy clothes is plainly obligated to do so, and Singer held that the geographic distance of a dying child abroad makes no moral difference to the same obligation. The essay concluded that affluent people are bound to give away income up to the point of marginal sacrifice toward famine relief.[^1][^5] + +The essay became one of the most reprinted pieces in modern moral philosophy and supplied effective altruism its motivating intuition; movement organizers and [[William MacAskill]] have described the drowning-child argument as the writing that did more than any other to launch the movement. Singer joined [[Giving What We Can]] in November 2009, pledging at least ten percent of his income, the year [[Toby Ord]] and MacAskill founded the society.[^2][^5] + +### Animal Liberation and the Expanding Circle + +*Animal Liberation*, published in 1975, argued that the interests of all sentient beings deserve equal consideration and that disregarding animal suffering on the basis of species, which Singer following Richard Ryder called "speciesism," is a prejudice structurally like racism. The book became the foundational text of the modern animal-rights movement and the intellectual basis for the farmed-animal-welfare cause that effective altruism later adopted as a priority; Singer has served on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators.[^3] + +*The Expanding Circle*, published in 1981, drew on sociobiology to argue that the scope of beings a person treats as morally considerable has widened over history from kin to tribe to nation to all humanity and, Singer urged, should widen further to all sentient life, with impartial reason as the engine of that expansion. Singer's normative position was for decades a preference utilitarianism, on which an act's rightness depends on how far it satisfies the preferences of those affected; in *The Point of View of the Universe* (2014), written with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, he returned to a hedonistic utilitarianism descended from [[Henry Sidgwick]].[^6] + +### The Life You Can Save and Effective Altruism + +Singer's 2009 book *The Life You Can Save* restated the case for effective giving against global poverty and gave its name to a charity Singer co-founded in 2013 with the psychologist Charlie Bresler, which evaluates and recommends high-impact poverty charities. His 2013 TED talk "The why and how of effective altruism" and his 2015 book *The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically* placed him at the public head of the movement.[^7][^8] + +In 2013 Singer delivered a keynote at the Effective Altruism Summit, a week-long gathering in the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] that brought together the Oxford philosophers, the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]], and the [[Rationalist Community]]. The 2013 summit was the same event that [[Peter Thiel]] keynoted, and the year before [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] adopted the earning-to-give strategy MacAskill had presented to him. Singer was awarded the inaugural Berggruen Prize in 2021, donating the one-million-dollar award.[^2][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Singer, Peter. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." *Philosophy and Public Affairs,* vol. 1, no. 3, 1972, on the central principle and the drowning-child argument. Reprinted at Giving What We Can. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/videos-books-and-essays/famine-affluence-and-morality-peter-singer +[^2]: "Peter Singer's Keynote, Effective Altruism Summit 2013," on the 2013 Bay Area summit address; "The drowning child," Princeton University Press, on the argument's role in launching the movement. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-drowning-child +[^3]: "Peter Singer," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Princeton University Center for Human Values, on the 1946 birth, the Melbourne and Oxford degrees, Monash, the 1999 Princeton appointment, *Animal Liberation,* and the disability protests. https://uchv.princeton.edu/people/peter-singer +[^4]: Singer, Peter. *Practical Ethics.* Cambridge University Press, 1979. +[^5]: "Death in a Shallow Pond," Princeton University Press (David Edmonds), on the reprinting history and the argument's foundational role in effective altruism. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691254029/death-in-a-shallow-pond +[^6]: Singer, Peter. *The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology.* Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981; de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. *The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.* Oxford University Press, 2014. +[^7]: "About Us," The Life You Can Save, on the 2009 book, the 2013 co-founding with Charlie Bresler, and the charity's mission. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/about-us/ +[^8]: Singer, Peter. "The why and how of effective altruism," TED2013; Singer, Peter. *The Most Good You Can Do.* Yale University Press, 2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Steve Sailer.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Steve Sailer.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..93d5abf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Steve Sailer.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - SteveSailer + - HumanBiodiversity + - RaceScience + - AltRight + - Immigration +summary: "Steve Sailer is an American journalist and blogger who popularized the term human biodiversity, founded its discussion network in the late 1990s, and originated the white-turnout 'Sailer Strategy,' becoming a connective figure between hereditarian race science and the alt-right." +born: 1958-12-20 +location: "Los Angeles, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Steve Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist and blogger who became the leading popularizer of [[Human Biodiversity|human biodiversity]], the euphemism for hereditarian claims about race and intelligence, and a connective figure between academic race science and the [[Alt-Right|alt-right]]. He founded the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group in the late 1990s, wrote for paleoconservative and anti-immigration outlets, and originated an electoral theory that anticipated the racial politics of the [[Donald Trump|Trump]] era.[^1][^2] + +### Human Biodiversity and the Sailer Strategy + +Sailer organized an invitation-only Human Biodiversity Discussion Group around 1998 and built an audience for hereditarian arguments through his columns and blog. He drew on the race-and-IQ framework of [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and presented average group differences in intelligence as genetically grounded, a position mainstream science rejects as scientific racism. In 2000 he advanced what became known as the "Sailer Strategy," the argument that the Republican Party should win national elections by maximizing turnout among white voters rather than courting minorities, a thesis later echoed in the [[Steve Bannon|Bannon]]-era nationalist politics.[^1][^3] + +Sailer created a "Roster of Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members" dated March 3, 1999, and later styled the listserv the Human Biodiversity Institute. The invitation-only group drew academics in race-and-IQ and sex-difference research along with sympathetic journalists, among them the science writer [[Razib Khan]] and the anthropologist [[Gregory Cochran]]. After the 2016 election the columnist [[Michael Barone]] credited Sailer with having mapped in 2001 the white-turnout electoral route that Trump later followed, and the writer's racial-realignment thesis circulated in nationalist circles around Bannon.[^5][^6] + +### Outlets and Influence + +Sailer wrote film criticism and political commentary for [[United Press International]] and *[[National Review]]* before parting with the latter, and he became a regular contributor to the anti-immigration website [[VDARE]] and to *[[Taki's Magazine]]*. His framing of "noticing" group differences and his immigration-restrictionist "citizenism" circulated widely in the online right and were cited by alt-right and neoreactionary writers, placing his work in the same hereditarian substrate that runs through [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s [[Neoreaction|neoreaction]] and the race-science discourse that surfaced inside the [[Rationalist Community]]. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classifies Sailer as a promoter of racist pseudoscience.[^2][^4] + +Born in 1958 and adopted by a Lockheed engineer, Sailer grew up in Studio City and took a degree from [[Rice University]] in 1980 and an MBA from the [[University of California, Los Angeles|UCLA]] in 1982. He wrote a *National Review* column from 1994 until he was pushed out in 1997 around the time [[Rich Lowry]] succeeded [[John O'Sullivan]] as editor. His "citizenism," coined in the mid-2000s, held that Americans should weigh the welfare of fellow citizens above that of foreigners, a frame later adopted by the columnist [[John Derbyshire]]; in February 2024 the new-right house [[Passage Publishing]] issued a collected volume of his work titled *Noticing: An Essential Reader, 1973-2023*.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Human Biodiversity, Open Borders, IQ, and Western Civilization," CAIRCO, documenting Sailer's role in popularizing "human biodiversity" and the discussion group; recorded as the movement's self-description, not an endorsement. https://www.cairco.org/highlights/open-borders-iq-and-western-civilization +[^2]: "Steve Sailer," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/steve-sailer +[^3]: Sailer, Steve, columns on the "Sailer Strategy," 2000 onward; collected in *Noticing: An Essential Reader,* 2024. +[^4]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve.* Free Press, 1994, the hereditarian framework Sailer drew upon. +[^5]: "Human Biodiversity Institute," documenting the March 3, 1999 roster of the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group and its membership; treated as a record of the group's self-description, not an endorsement. +[^6]: "Steve Sailer," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the HBD group, the discussion list, and the Sailer Strategy. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/steve-sailer +[^7]: "Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023)," Passage Publishing, 2024, on the collected volume; biographical details on the Rice and UCLA degrees and the 1994-1997 National Review column from contemporaneous reporting. https://passage.press/products/noticingpaperback diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Toby Ord.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Toby Ord.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8bbdd862 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Toby Ord.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - Oxford + - ExistentialRisk + - FutureOfHumanityInstitute +alias: + - Toby Ord + - Toby David Godfrey Ord +summary: "Toby Ord is an Australian moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded Giving What We Can and the effective altruism movement, was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and wrote The Precipice, which argues there is a one-in-six chance humanity suffers an existential catastrophe this century." +born: 1979 +location: "Oxford, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Toby Ord (born July 1979) is an Australian moral philosopher at the [[University of Oxford]] who cofounded the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and became one of the leading academic theorists of existential risk. He founded [[Giving What We Can]], the pledge society that anchored the movement's early growth, was a senior research fellow at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and wrote *The Precipice*, a 2020 book arguing that humanity faces a roughly one-in-six chance of an existential catastrophe within the next hundred years.[^1][^2] + +### Giving What We Can + +Ord was born in [[Melbourne]] and studied computer science before switching to philosophy at the [[University of Melbourne]], then moved to Oxford for graduate work. There he calculated that he could earn roughly 1.5 million pounds over his career and give away about a million of it while keeping a graduate student's standard of living, and he pledged to donate everything above a fixed personal income. In 2009 he and the philosopher [[William MacAskill]] founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge at least ten percent of their income to the most cost-effective charities; its members have collectively pledged well over a billion dollars. The pledge model, paired with the charity-evaluation work of [[GiveWell]] and [[Holden Karnofsky]], formed the practical core of effective altruism.[^3][^4] + +Ord launched Giving What We Can in November 2009 alongside his wife, the physician Bernadette Young, with whom he committed to capping his own annual spending and donating the rest. He set his personal living allowance at about 18,000 pounds a year, giving away everything earned above it toward a lifetime target of one million pounds, with the bulk going to the SCI Foundation and Deworm the World (both deworming programs), the [[Against Malaria Foundation]], and the poverty-research lab J-PAL. The society grew from a handful of Oxford members to more than 9,000, and by March 2022 the pledges of its members totaled more than 2.5 billion dollars in expected lifetime giving.[^3][^7] + +### Future of Humanity Institute and Existential Risk + +Ord was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Oxford center founded by [[Nick Bostrom]] in 2005 that became the academic headquarters of [[Longtermism|longtermism]]. His research moved from the ethics of global poverty toward existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential, the same focus that animated Bostrom's work and the AI-safety concerns of the [[Rationalist Community]]. Ord has advised the [[World Health Organization]], the [[World Bank]], the [[World Economic Forum]], the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister's Office.[^1][^2] + +The Future of Humanity Institute closed on April 16, 2024 after nineteen years, with Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy declining to renew the remaining staff contracts following a 2020 freeze on its hiring and fundraising; Bostrom called it "death by bureaucracy." The shutdown followed a period of reputational damage, including the 2023 resurfacing of a 1996 email in which Bostrom had used a racial slur, for which he apologized and which prompted an Oxford inquiry. Ord had by then moved to the Oxford Martin School's AI Governance Initiative, continuing the existential-risk work the institute had housed.[^8][^9] + +### The Precipice + +*The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity*, published in 2020, surveyed the catastrophes that could end the human story, natural and anthropogenic, and assigned probabilities to each. Ord judged engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence the gravest near-term threats and estimated the combined chance of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six. The book argued that reducing such risks should rank among the highest global priorities, the central claim of the longtermist program that MacAskill later developed in *What We Owe the Future* and that the [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] funded before its 2022 collapse.[^5][^6] + +Ord's Table 6.1 gave per-century estimates that placed unaligned artificial intelligence at roughly one in ten, engineered pandemics at one in thirty, nuclear war and climate change at one in a thousand each, and all natural risks combined (asteroids, supervolcanoes, naturally arising pandemics) at only about one in ten thousand. He stressed that the anthropogenic figures were order-of-magnitude judgments that could "easily be a factor of 3 higher or lower," and that the era of human-made existential risk had begun only with the atomic bomb in 1945, which he called the start of the "Precipice." His framing of AI as the single largest source of extinction risk became a load-bearing premise for the AI-safety funding that flowed from [[Open Philanthropy]] and the FTX Future Fund into the labs and research centers.[^2][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Toby Ord," Giving What We Can profile, on the Oxford position, the Future of Humanity Institute fellowship, and advisory roles. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/people/toby-ord +[^2]: Ord, Toby. *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.* Bloomsbury, 2020. +[^3]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the career-earnings calculation and the pledge. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11950843 +[^4]: "Our history," Giving What We Can, on the 2009 founding with William MacAskill and the cumulative pledge total. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history +[^5]: "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, on the one-in-six estimate and the book's argument. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-precipice-existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity/ +[^6]: "Existential risk and the future of humanity (Toby Ord)," EA Forum, on the book's risk taxonomy and probability estimates. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BAfEgTaK5BsperQEc/existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity-toby-ord +[^7]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the 18,000-pound living allowance and the named charities; "Oxford-based charity receives more than $2.5 billion in pledges," University of Oxford, March 1, 2022. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-03-01-oxford-based-charity-receives-more-25-billion-pledges-community-effective-givers +[^8]: "Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher," *The Guardian,* April 20, 2024, on the April 16, 2024 closure and "death by bureaucracy." https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/04/20/oxford-shuts-down-elon-musk-funded-future-of-humanity-institute/ +[^9]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the 2020 hiring freeze, the contract non-renewals, and the institute's nineteen-year run. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute +[^10]: "Some thoughts on Toby Ord's existential risk estimates," EA Forum, reproducing Table 6.1 with the one-in-ten AI figure and the order-of-magnitude caveat. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z5KZ2cui8WDjyF6gJ/some-thoughts-on-toby-ord-s-existential-risk-estimates diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Tom Pritzker.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Tom Pritzker.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a6308e90 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Tom Pritzker.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: + - Person + - TomPritzker + - Hyatt + - JeffreyEpstein + - SecretSociety + - Billionaire +alias: + - Thomas J. Pritzker + - Thomas Pritzker +summary: "Thomas J. Pritzker is the billionaire executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and chairman of the Pritzker family's business empire, whose 2011 correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein used the phrase 'secret society' (Epstein Files document EFTA02407727), establishing a parallel 'secret society' channel through Epstein independent of the Peter Thiel correspondence." +born: 1950-06-06 +location: "Chicago, Illinois (family base)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Thomas J. Pritzker (born June 6, 1950) is an American billionaire businessman, the executive chairman of [[Hyatt Hotels Corporation]], and the chairman of the broader [[Pritzker Organization|Pritzker family]] business empire. The Pritzker family's holdings span hotels (Hyatt), industrial manufacturing ([[Marmon Group|Marmon Group/Trinity Industries]]), finance, and the philanthropic [[Pritzker Foundation|Pritzker Foundation]], and the family's cumulative wealth places it among the wealthiest American business dynasties. Pritzker's correspondence with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] in 2011, documented in the EFTA releases as document [[EFTA02407727|EFTA02407727]], used the phrase "secret society," establishing a second documented "secret society" channel through Epstein independent of the [[Peter Thiel]] correspondence.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Pritzker Family and the Hyatt Empire + +The [[Pritzker family|Pritzker family]] built its wealth across the twentieth century through a diversified holding structure anchored by Hyatt (founded by Pritzker's father [[Donald Pritzker|Donald]] and uncle [[Jay Pritzker|Jay]] in 1957), the Marmon Group industrial conglomerate, the [[Superior Bank|Superior Bank]] (which failed in 2001 in an early instance of the securitization-driven banking collapses), and a range of venture and private-equity holdings. Thomas Pritzker succeeded his father and uncle as the principal executive of the family's business operations and took Hyatt public in 2009.[^1] + +The Pritzker family's philanthropic arm, the Pritzker Foundation, has funded the [[Pritzker School of Medicine|Pritzker School of Medicine]] at the [[University of Chicago]], the [[Pritzker Military Museum & Library|Pritzker Military Museum & Library]], and a range of cultural and educational institutions in [[Chicago]] and nationally. [[J.B. Pritzker|J.B. Pritzker]], Thomas's cousin, is the current [[Governor of Illinois|Governor of Illinois]] and a prominent [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] political figure. The family's political and philanthropic footprint spans both parties and multiple institutional sectors.[^1] + +### The Epstein Correspondence and the "Secret Society" Email + +The EFTA releases include document EFTA02407727, a 2011 correspondence between Pritzker and Jeffrey Epstein in which Pritzker used the phrase "secret society." Epstein's reply, per the document, was "Remind me next month." The document is indexed in the [[Epstein Files|Epstein file]] aggregators and cited in the secondary reporting on the Epstein-Pritzker relationship. The correspondence is dated 2011, three years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement.[^2][^3] + +The Pritzker "secret society" email runs parallel to the Thiel-Epstein "secret society idea" correspondence (documented in [[EFTA01738574|EFTA01738574]], dated February 2016). The two are independent channels: the Thiel correspondence records Epstein reporting that Thiel "LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea," and the Pritzker correspondence records Pritzker himself using the phrase. Whether the two channels refer to the same "secret society" concept or to separate projects is not established in the primary documents. The 2011 Pritzker email predates the 2016 Thiel email by five years.[^2][^4] + +### The Pritzker-Epstein Relationship + +The *Wall Street Journal* reported in 2023, on the basis of the Epstein calendars, that Pritzker was among the business figures who met with Epstein repeatedly in the post-2008-conviction period. Pritzker's meetings with Epstein occurred in the 2011-2014 window and included discussions that Pritzker's representatives framed as relating to philanthropic and business matters. The *Wall Street Journal* reporting placed Pritzker alongside [[William Burns]], [[Noam Chomsky]], and the former Goldman Sachs lawyer [[Kathryn Ruemmler|Kathryn Ruemmler]] in the group of establishment figures whose Epstein meetings were documented in the calendars.[^3] + +The Pritzker-Epstein relationship is the parallel establishment channel to the Thiel-Epstein relationship. Both channels run through Epstein in the post-2008-conviction period, both involve "secret society" language, and both connect Epstein to principals of major business and institutional networks (the Pritzker hotel-and-finance empire and the Thiel technology-and-defense empire respectively). The question of whether the two channels intersect, beyond the shared Epstein intermediary, is not documented in the primary sources currently available.[^2][^3][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Hyatt Hotels Corporation, "Board of Directors: Thomas J. Pritzker," documenting his role as executive chairman (assumed 2004), the November 2009 IPO, and his Marmon Holdings chairmanship. https://investors.hyatt.com/governance/board-of-directors/ +[^2]: EFTA02407727, Epstein Files Transparency Act release. The 2011 Pritzker-Epstein correspondence using the phrase "secret society," with Epstein's reply "Remind me next month." Documented in the Epstein file aggregators. +[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Private Calendar" series, *Wall Street Journal,* 2023, documenting the Pritzker-Epstein meetings from the Epstein calendars. +[^4]: For the parallel Thiel-Epstein "secret society idea" correspondence, see EFTA01738574 (February 6, 2016) and the Peter Thiel and [[Thiel Influence Network]] pages. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Trae Stephens.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Trae Stephens.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6ba0b4de --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Trae Stephens.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - TraeStephens + - Anduril + - FoundersFund + - Palantir + - DefenseTech + - Trump +summary: "Trae Stephens is a Founders Fund partner and cofounder of Anduril Industries who began as an intelligence-community linguist and early Palantir employee, led the Department of Defense team on Donald Trump's 2016 transition, and whose ACTS 17 Collective hosted Peter Thiel's 2025 Antichrist lectures." +born: 1983 +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Trae Stephens is an American investor and defense-technology executive who is a partner at [[Founders Fund]], the cofounder and executive chairman of [[Anduril Industries]], an early employee of [[Palantir Technologies]], and the official who led the Department of Defense team on [[Donald Trump]]'s 2016 presidential transition. He holds positions at [[Peter Thiel]]'s venture firm, Thiel's original government-data company, and the defense startup the firm bankrolled, and his ACTS 17 Collective hosted Thiel's 2025 lecture series on the [[Antichrist]].[^1][^2] + +### Intelligence Community Origins + +Stephens entered [[Georgetown University]]'s School of Foreign Service after the September 11 attacks, studying Arabic and security studies and graduating in 2006. He began his career in the office of then-Congressman [[Rob Portman]] and in the political-affairs office of the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, in the period following the installation of [[Hamid Karzai]]'s transitional government. He then worked as a computational linguist inside the United States intelligence community, building enterprise tools for Arabic and Persian name-matching and data enrichment.[^2][^3] + +While in that intelligence-community role Stephens saw a demonstration of Palantir's software and left to join the company in 2008. Palantir had been founded in 2003 with early backing from the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] venture arm [[In-Q-Tel]], and Stephens joined as one of its early employees while the company was still small.[^3] + +### Palantir + +At Palantir, Stephens led teams focused on the company's growth in the intelligence and defense market and on its international expansion, working with large government organizations on data-analysis deployments. He was described as a forward-deployed engineer, the Palantir job category that embeds technical staff directly inside client agencies, though his function centered on managing the company's sales pipeline. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown during the period.[^2][^3] + +His six years at Palantir, from 2008 to roughly 2014, overlapped with the company's expansion from a post-September 11 counterterrorism contractor into a fixture of the U.S. intelligence and defense procurement system. The relationships he built on the government side of that business carried into his subsequent venture-capital and defense-startup work.[^3] + +### Founders Fund + +Stephens joined Founders Fund in 2013 and became a partner in 2014, concentrating his investing on startups operating in the government and defense-technology space. His investing centered on the firm's defense and government portfolio, which grew into Founders Fund's distinguishing focus over the following decade.[^1][^4] + +From the Founders Fund position Stephens became one of the principal architects of the firm's defense-and-government portfolio, and he has argued publicly that the defense-technology sector faces a coming shakeout in which a small number of companies, Anduril among them, consolidate the market. He sits on the boards of several portfolio companies and is affiliated with the [[Federalist Society]].[^4][^5] + +### Anduril Industries + +Stephens cofounded Anduril Industries in 2017 with [[Palmer Luckey]] and a group of Palantir and Oculus alumni, taking the role of executive chairman while Founders Fund served as the first institutional backer. Anduril builds autonomous-surveillance and weapons systems, including the Lattice software platform, drones, and border-surveillance towers, for the U.S. military and border-security agencies.[^1][^6] + +Anduril closed a 2.5 billion dollar Series G round in 2025 led by Founders Fund, which wrote a single one-billion-dollar check, the largest in the firm's history. Stephens became a billionaire on the strength of the round in June 2025. The round routed Founders Fund capital into a company Stephens had cofounded while he remained a partner at the firm writing the check.[^6][^7] + +### The 2016 Pentagon Transition + +In late 2016 Stephens served on President-elect Trump's transition team, where he led the Department of Defense landing team responsible for reviewing the Pentagon and staffing its incoming leadership. The placement put a Founders Fund partner and former Palantir executive in charge of the defense-agency transition for an administration that Thiel had publicly endorsed and helped staff, during the same period Thiel placed associates including [[Kevin Harrington]] onto the National Security Council.[^2][^8] + +Anduril, which Stephens cofounded the following year, went on to win contracts across the Defense Department and the border-security agencies whose incoming leadership the transition he led had helped review and staff.[^6][^8] + +### Faith and the ACTS 17 Collective + +Stephens is an openly Christian investor who has spoken through the Faith Driven Investor network about integrating his religious convictions with venture capital and defense work. With his wife, [[Michelle Stephens]], he is associated with the [[ACTS 17 Collective]], a San Francisco group that convenes technology figures around Christianity.[^9] + +The ACTS 17 Collective, run by Michelle Stephens, hosted Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series on the Antichrist at the [[Commonwealth Club]] in September and October 2025. The lectures were off the record, and a recording later reached the *Washington Post*, which reported on them in October 2025.[^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Trae Stephens," Founders Fund team page, on his partner role, the Anduril cofounding, and the Palantir and intelligence-community background. https://foundersfund.com/team/trae-stephens/ +[^2]: "Trae Stephens (SFS'06)," Georgetown University School of Foreign Service alumni profile, on the Arabic and security-studies degree, the Portman and Afghan-embassy roles, and the Trump transition. https://sfs.georgetown.edu/alumni/trae-stephens-sfs06/ +[^3]: "Trae Stephens," Federalist Society biography, on the computational-linguist intelligence-community role, the 2008 move to Palantir, and the Georgetown adjunct appointment. https://fedsoc.org/bio/trae-stephens +[^4]: "Anduril's Trae Stephens says defense tech is headed for a shakeout," *Fortune,* June 5, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/anduril-trae-stephens-founders-fund-defense-tech-ipo-palantir-venture-capital/ +[^5]: "The Investor Who Called Defense Tech's Big Moment," *Newcomer,* on Stephens's defense-investing thesis. https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-investor-who-called-defense-techs +[^6]: "Trae Stephens," Anduril Industries leadership and the Series G round; company records and contemporaneous reporting, 2025. +[^7]: "Anduril raises $2.5 billion Series G led by Founders Fund," reporting on the one-billion-dollar Founders Fund check and Stephens's billionaire status, June 2025. +[^8]: "Trae Stephens to lead Trump's Department of Defense transition," contemporaneous reporting on the late-2016 Pentagon landing team. See also the Georgetown SFS profile. +[^9]: "Trae Stephens," Faith Driven Investor biography, on his Christian investing identity. https://faithdriveninvestor.org/bios/trae-stephens/ +[^10]: "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco about the Antichrist," *Fortune,* September 2, 2025, on the ACTS 17 Collective and Michelle Stephens hosting the series. https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-commonwealth-club-san-francisco-acts-17-collective-rene-girard/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Alan Watts.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Alan Watts.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9a2ed9ba --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Alan Watts.md @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +--- +category: "Authors & Journalists" +tags: + - Person + - AlanWatts + - Zen + - Counterculture + - Psychedelics + - HumanPotentialMovement + - Pacifica +alias: + - Alan Watts + - Alan Wilson Watts +summary: "Alan Watts was the British-born interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism for Western audiences whose books and Pacifica radio talks shaped the spiritual vocabulary of the 1960s counterculture." +born: 1915-01-06 +died: 1973-11-16 +location: "Chislehurst, England; San Francisco Bay Area, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 to November 16, 1973) was an English-born writer, lecturer, and former Episcopal priest who became one of the most widely read interpreters of Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism for Western readers. Born in Chislehurst, outside London, he published his first pamphlet on Zen at twenty, emigrated to the United States in 1938, was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1944, and left the church in 1950. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1951 to teach at the American Academy of Asian Studies, built a large lay following through weekly talks on the Pacifica radio station [[KPFA]], and wrote more than twenty-five books, among them *The Way of Zen* (1957) and *The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are* (1966). He died at his cabin on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County on November 16, 1973.[^1][^2] + +### The Way of Zen + +*The Way of Zen*, published by Pantheon in 1957, was among the first books to present Zen Buddhism to a general English-speaking audience and became a bestseller. Watts traced Zen's roots through Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism into the Ch'an and Zen schools of China and Japan, devoting the first half of the book to the historical and philosophical background of the tradition and the second half to its principles and practice. He had been reading and writing about Zen since his teens in England, where he encountered the work of the Japanese scholar [[D. T. Suzuki]] and the Buddhist Lodge in London under Christmas Humphreys, and he published *The Spirit of Zen* in 1936 at the age of twenty-one.[^1][^3] + +Watts followed *The Way of Zen* with *Nature, Man and Woman* (1958) and a series of books extending his comparative reading of Eastern and Western thought. His exposition stressed the experiential and nondual core of Zen over its monastic discipline, an emphasis that drew criticism from practitioners who held that he wrote about Zen without sustained formal training under a teacher. He addressed the charge directly in the 1959 essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen," distinguishing his approach both from the casual appropriation of Zen by the Beat writers and from the rigid formalism he saw in some Western converts.[^3][^4] + +### The American Academy of Asian Studies + +The American Academy of Asian Studies was founded in San Francisco in 1950 by the businessman Louis Gainsborough, with the Stanford comparative-religion scholar [[Frederic Spiegelberg]] as director of studies. Watts joined the faculty in early 1951 at Spiegelberg's invitation to teach Buddhism and comparative philosophy, and when financial trouble forced Gainsborough to step back in late 1952 Watts took over administrative leadership, serving as the academy's dean through the mid-1950s. The faculty included the Indian philosopher Haridas Chaudhuri and the Japanese painter Saburo Hasegawa, who taught Watts the aesthetics of sumi-e ink painting and the tea ceremony.[^5][^6] + +The academy ran an influential program of weekly Friday-evening colloquia and trained a circle of students and teachers who carried Asian philosophy into Bay Area intellectual life. Among the students who passed through its orbit was Richard "Dick" Price, who studied with Watts and later cofounded the [[Esalen Institute]] with [[Michael Murphy]]. The academy's educational successor, through Chaudhuri's later Cultural Integration Fellowship, became the California Institute of Asian Studies, incorporated in 1968 and renamed the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1980.[^5][^6] + +### KPFA and the Pacifica Talks + +Watts began broadcasting on the listener-sponsored Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley in 1953 with a program called "The Great Books of Asia," and in 1956 launched "Way Beyond the West," an unscripted weekly talk on Eastern philosophy and religion that ran for years and was syndicated to other Pacifica stations. Like the other volunteer programmers at the noncommercial station, Watts was unpaid for the broadcasts, which he delivered as extemporaneous monologues. The recordings circulated long after his death and supplied the source material for many of the audio lectures by which he is still widely known.[^1][^7] + +The radio talks made Watts a familiar voice in the popular reception of Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta on the West Coast and reached an audience far larger than his books alone. He continued recording lectures through the 1960s, often produced by his son Mark Watts, and lived for part of this period on a converted ferryboat, the *Vallejo*, moored at Gate 5 in the Sausalito waterfront community alongside the painter Jean Varda and, earlier, the philosopher Gerald Heard's circle.[^1][^2] + +### The Book and the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are + +*The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are*, published by Pantheon in 1966, set out Watts's central thesis in plain language: that the felt sense of being a separate ego, a skin-encapsulated self set against an external world, is a social and linguistic illusion, and that each person is an expression of the whole universe rather than a stranger dropped into it. Drawing on the Vedanta doctrine that the individual self (atman) is identical with the ground of all being (Brahman), Watts argued that the conventional self-image is a cultural taboo enforced by upbringing and language, and that seeing through it is the aim of the religious traditions he interpreted.[^8] + +Watts framed the book as the message he would want to pass to his own children about who and what they were, and it became one of his most enduring works. He had developed the same nondual argument across earlier books including *Psychotherapy East and West* (1961), in which he proposed that Buddhism and Taoism function less as religions than as forms of psychotherapy aimed at liberating people from artificial constraints of self-definition, comparing their methods with those of Western psychoanalysis and the humanistic psychologies then emerging.[^9][^8] + +### Psychedelics and The New Alchemy + +Watts experimented with [[mescaline]] and [[LSD]] beginning in the late 1950s, taking the drugs in controlled settings as part of his inquiry into whether the states they produced corresponded to the mystical experiences described in the contemplative traditions. He published his first account of these experiments as the essay "The New Alchemy," which appeared in his 1960 collection *This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience*, identifying mescaline and LSD as the two chemicals most useful for producing a shift of consciousness. He developed the theme at greater length in *The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness* (1962), for which [[Timothy Leary]] and [[Richard Alpert]] wrote an introduction.[^10][^11] + +Watts maintained that psychedelics could offer genuine glimpses of mystical awareness but were instruments rather than ends, comparable to a telescope or a piano, and he warned against mistaking the chemically induced experience for the realization itself, summarizing his view with the remark that "when you get the message, hang up the phone." He admired [[Aldous Huxley]]'s *The Doors of Perception* (1954), and his own essays on the drugs were among the texts that gave the psychedelic movement its vocabulary.[^10][^11] + +### Esalen and the Human Potential Movement + +Watts was present at the Esalen Institute from its earliest days at Big Sur, giving one of the first lecture programs there in January 1962, the year the institute opened, and returning to lead seminars through the 1960s. His interpretations of Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta, together with the framework of "human potentialities" he shared with Huxley, supplied part of the intellectual basis for the seminars that Murphy and Price built into the Human Potential movement. The anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]], who would spend his last years at Esalen, was among the figures Watts lectured alongside in this period.[^2][^12] + +Watts spent his final years dividing his time between the *Vallejo* houseboat in Sausalito and the cabin on Mount Tamalpais, lecturing widely and recording prolifically, and he published his autobiography *In My Own Way* in 1972. He died in his sleep at the Mount Tamalpais cabin on November 16, 1973, at the age of fifty-eight; his collaboration with Al Chung-liang Huang on Taoism appeared posthumously as *Tao: The Watercourse Way* in 1975.[^1][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "About Alan Watts," Alan Watts Organization biography, on his birth on January 6, 1915 in Chislehurst, ordination as an Episcopal priest in 1944, departure from the priesthood in 1950, arrival in San Francisco in 1951, teaching at the American Academy of Asian Studies, the KPFA programs "The Great Books of Asia" (1953) and "Way Beyond the West" (1956), his books, and his death on Mount Tamalpais on November 16, 1973. https://alanwatts.org/biography +[^2]: Watts, Alan. *In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915 to 1965.* Pantheon, 1972, on his life, the Sausalito houseboat *Vallejo*, the Mount Tamalpais cabin, and his association with Esalen and Gregory Bateson. +[^3]: Watts, Alan. *The Way of Zen.* Pantheon, 1957; and Watts, Alan. *The Spirit of Zen.* John Murray, 1936, on his early study of Zen through D. T. Suzuki and the London Buddhist Lodge. +[^4]: Watts, Alan. "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen." *Chicago Review,* 1958; reprinted by City Lights, 1959, on his distinction from Beat and convert appropriations of Zen. +[^5]: "The American Academy of Asian Studies," Mysterium / Charles Cameron, on the 1950 founding by Louis Gainsborough, Frederic Spiegelberg as director of studies, Watts becoming administrator in 1952 and dean through the mid-1950s, and faculty including Haridas Chaudhuri and Saburo Hasegawa. https://www.mysterium.com/aaas.html +[^6]: "A Brief History of California Institute of Integral Studies," CIIS, on the academy's descent through Haridas Chaudhuri's Cultural Integration Fellowship to the California Institute of Asian Studies and the 1980 renaming to the California Institute of Integral Studies. https://www.ciis.edu/discover-ciis/our-history +[^7]: "KPFA Fund Drive: Alan Watts, Way Beyond the West," KPFA / Pacifica Radio, on Watts's unpaid volunteer broadcasts and the long run of "Way Beyond the West." https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-12-2016/ +[^8]: Watts, Alan. *The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.* Pantheon, 1966, on the illusion of the separate ego and the identity of atman and Brahman. +[^9]: Watts, Alan. *Psychotherapy East and West.* Pantheon, 1961, on Buddhism and Taoism as forms of psychotherapy compared with Western psychoanalysis. +[^10]: Watts, Alan. "The New Alchemy," in *This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience.* Pantheon, 1960, on mescaline and LSD as the two chemicals most useful for changing consciousness, and the "hang up the phone" formulation. https://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/alchemy.htm +[^11]: Watts, Alan. *The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness.* Pantheon, 1962, with an introduction by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. +[^12]: "A History of Esalen Institute," Steven Harper, on Watts's lecture at Big Sur in January 1962 and Dick Price's earlier study with Watts. https://www.stevenkharper.com/ahistoryofesaleninstitute.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Cari Tuna.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Cari Tuna.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bde8a948 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Cari Tuna.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +category: "Philanthropists & Benefactors" +tags: + - Person + - CariTuna + - OpenPhilanthropy + - EffectiveAltruism + - Philanthropy +summary: "Cari Tuna is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who, with her husband Dustin Moskovitz, leads Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy, making her a principal director of the largest sustained funding source for the effective-altruism movement." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Cari Tuna is an American former journalist who, with her husband [[Dustin Moskovitz]], directs the philanthropic apparatus that became the largest sustained funder of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement. She is the president of Good Ventures, the foundation she and Moskovitz established in 2011, and a leader of [[Open Philanthropy]], the grantmaking organization that channels their [[Facebook]]-derived fortune toward global health, longtermism, and AI-safety work.[^1][^2] + +### From Journalism to Philanthropy + +Tuna worked as a reporter for the *Wall Street Journal* before leaving to manage the couple's giving full time. She and Moskovitz, among the youngest signatories of the Giving Pledge, committed to donating the majority of their wealth, and they built Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy as the vehicles for doing so according to the evidence-and-reasoning methodology of effective altruism. Tuna became the public face of the operation, articulating its "give where it does the most good" framework.[^1][^3] + +Tuna and Moskovitz married in 2013 and signed the Giving Pledge in 2014 in their late twenties and early thirties, among the youngest people to do so. Tuna serves as president of Good Ventures and chairs the board of the grantmaking organization, the legal and governance counterpart to the staff research that [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Alexander Berger]] ran. She has described the couple's decision to delegate cause selection to a professional staff applying cost-effectiveness analysis rather than directing the money toward causes of personal sentiment, the organizing principle that distinguished their approach from conventional billionaire philanthropy.[^1][^3] + +### Open Philanthropy + +As a leader of Open Philanthropy, Tuna helped direct more than four billion dollars in grants across global health, scientific research, pandemic preparedness, farm-animal welfare, and the prevention of catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence. The longtermist and AI-risk portion of that giving made Open Philanthropy the principal institutional patron of the AI-safety community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and the AI company [[Anthropic]], the durable counterpart to the short-lived [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]].[^2][^4] + +The grantmaking arm rebranded as Coefficient Giving in November 2025, shifting toward multi-donor funds that other philanthropists could join, while Good Ventures remained the dominant source of its money. Tuna chairs the Good Ventures board that supplies that capital, leaving her with formal control over the largest single pool of effective-altruism funding even as professional staff make the grant decisions. The structure concentrated a substantial share of global AI-safety funding under one foundation, drawing criticism that the field examining the AI labs depended financially on a single donor couple who were also early investors in one of those labs.[^2][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Cari Tuna, Good Ventures, and the Open Philanthropy methodology. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason +[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^3]: "Cari Tuna," EA Forum topic entry on Good Ventures and the Giving Pledge. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/cari-tuna +[^4]: "How Effective is Effective Altruism?" *Inside Philanthropy,* March 16, 2023. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2023-3-16-how-effective-is-effective-altruism-a-deep-dive-into-two-of-open-philanthropys-ea-inspired-programs diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Curtis Yarvin.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Curtis Yarvin.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..db332061 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Curtis Yarvin.md @@ -0,0 +1,76 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - CurtisYarvin + - Moldbug + - Neoreaction + - DarkEnlightenment + - PeterThiel + - NRx +alias: + - Curtis Guy Yarvin + - Moldbug + - "Unqualified Reservations" +summary: "Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Moldbug, is an American software developer and political writer whose blog Unqualified Reservations (2007 onward) founded the neoreactionary movement and co-originated the Dark Enlightenment, and who is the most prominent intellectual patronized by Peter Thiel." +born: 1973-06-25 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Curtis Yarvin (born June 25, 1973) is an American software developer and political writer who publishes under the pen name [[Moldbug]] and is the founder of the [[Neoreaction]] (NRx) movement and co-originator of the [[Dark Enlightenment]] ideological current. His blog *Unqualified Reservations*, active from April 2007 through 2014, argued that liberal democracy is a failing state form and should be replaced by a corporate, monarchical government organized under what he termed [[Neocameralism]]. Yarvin is the most prominent intellectual financially patronized by [[Peter Thiel]], and his work is the ideological spine of the Thiel network's argument that concentrated private capacity should replace decentralized democratic government.[^1][^2] + +### The Unqualified Reservations Blog (2007-2014) + +Yarvin began writing *Unqualified Reservations* in April 2007, adopting the Moldbug persona and a deliberately archaic, allusive prose style modeled in part on the 19th-century reactionary writers ([[Thomas Carlyle|Thomas Carlyle]], [[Joseph de Maistre|Joseph de Maistre]]) he cited. The blog is preserved in full chronological archive at unqualified-reservations.org and in the [[Princeton University|Princeton University]] Digital Collections. The central arguments, developed across hundreds of long-form posts through 2014, held that the 20th-century liberal democratic state is a theocratic successor to [[Mainline Protestantism|mainline Protestant Christianity]], which Yarvin termed [[The Cathedral|The Cathedral]].[^1] + +The early blog output established the diagnostic frame. "The Ultracalvinist Hypothesis: In Perspective" (June 2007) argued that mainline Protestantism had secularized into the universalist academic-and-media consensus without losing its religious character. "Carlyle Rages Against the Coming of the Light" (June 2007) established Yarvin's debt to the Carlyle tradition of reactionary social criticism. The "How Dawkins Got Pwned" seven-part series critiqued [[Richard Dawkins|Richard Dawkins]] and New Atheism for failing to recognize the religious structure of their own secular universalism.[^1] + +### The Core Essay Series + +"An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" (April 2008) is the most-cited single *Unqualified Reservations* essay. The Open Letter makes the case that progressivism is a non-falsifiable religious framework rather than an empirical political position, and that no productive political argument is possible with someone operating inside the progressive framework. The essay is preserved in the Princeton University Digital Collections and is routinely cited in the academic literature on neoreaction as the canonical entry point to Yarvin's thought.[^1][^3] + +The "Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" series (2007-2009) is the systematic exposition. Chapter 5, "The Modern Structure" (February 2009), laid out the Cathedral thesis in its most structured form. The Gentle Introduction was later compiled into a standalone ebook volume (2015) described by the archive as a "concentrated dose" of the blog's core themes.[^1] + +The "Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century" series (2008) is the constructive neocameral proposal. Chapter 3, "What We Have and What's So Bad About It" (November 27, 2008), described the "Mencist vision" of sovereign joint-stock "patches" (corporate city-states) replacing nation-states. The Patchwork series was later published as a standalone ebook and preserved at Princeton University Digital Collections. "Why Carlyle Matters" (July 16, 2009) is the later essay that re-articulated the Carlyle debt for readers who had arrived at the blog through the Patchwork and Gentle Introduction material.[^1] + +"The Path to (Dark) Enlightenment" (March 2013) is the later retrospective post that indexed the major works and consolidated the argument as the neoreactionary movement began to attract broader attention. The post runs through the full sequence from the ultracalvinist hypothesis through the Cathedral thesis to the neocameral proposal, and it functions as the internal map of the *Unqualified Reservations* corpus.[^1] + +### The Neocameral Proposal + +Yarvin's neocameral proposal, developed primarily in the Patchwork series, argues that sovereign territory should be owned as corporate property by shareholders who appoint a chief executive with absolute operational authority. The executive's incentive to maintain the capital value of the territory (and thus the share price) would produce better governance than the electoral incentive structure. The model is explicitly modeled on the governance of [[Singapore]] under [[Lee Kuan Yew|Lee Kuan Yew]] and on the chartered-company colonial model of the [[British East India Company|British East India Company]].[^1] The term derives from the cameralism of 18th-century [[Prussia|Prussia]], which Yarvin updates by substituting a joint-stock ownership structure for the hereditary monarch. + +The enforcement mechanism is cryptographic: in the Patchwork formulation, the shareholders "hold the master encryption keys" to the state's security forces (Yarvin's "invincible robot armies"), so that physical control of the means of violence tracks ownership of the equity rather than the will of any officeholder, eliminating the coup risk that would otherwise constrain an absolute executive.[^5] Yarvin pairs this with two doctrines from the earlier *Unqualified Reservations* posts: "formalism," which holds that real power relationships should be openly titled as property rather than disguised behind democratic ritual, and the preference for "exit over voice," under which residents who dislike a patch's management relocate to a competing patch rather than vote, the patches competing for tax-paying residents as firms compete for customers. He describes the resulting entity, which he abbreviates "Sov," as a "clean, lean and mean revenue-extracting machine" whose goal is "loot," disciplined only by the shareholders' interest in not destroying the asset's resale value.[^5] + +### The Dark Enlightenment and Nick Land + +The Dark Enlightenment is the broader current that formed around Yarvin's writing and that of the British philosopher [[Nick Land]]. Land, a former member of the [[CCRU]] at the [[University of Warwick]], had developed a body of work on right-accelerationism that argued capitalism and technological change should be allowed to dissolve the existing political order without restraint. Land's framing supplied the metaphysical and technological register; Yarvin's supplied the political and institutional register. The synthesis was named the Dark Enlightenment in a 2012 essay, and the neoreactionary current is the political-organizational expression of the broader Dark Enlightenment frame.[^2] + +Neoreaction and the violent Accelerationism of the [[James Mason]] *[[Siege]]* tradition share a diagnosis but diverge on method. The accelerationist tradition ([[Atomwaffen Division]], [[The Base]], [[Terrorgram Collective]]) holds that liberal democracy should be collapsed by targeted violence to produce revolutionary conditions; Yarvin and Land hold that liberal democracy is collapsing of its own contradictions and that the role of the neoreactionary is to build the institutional successor, not to hasten the collapse. The two currents cite some of the same sources and attract some of the same readers, but the operational programs are incompatible: neoreaction is procedural and capital-intensive; violent accelerationism is paramilitary and cell-based.[^3] + +### The Thiel Patronage + +The Thiel patronage converts the neoreactionary current from an online subculture into a funded intellectual project. Thiel's 2009 [[Cato Unbound]] essay "The Education of a Libertarian" declared "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," a formulation tracking Yarvin's argument, and Thiel has provided financial support to Yarvin across multiple years. The patronage is documented in public reporting and in Yarvin's own references to his funding; the precise amounts and the legal structure of the support are not fully public.[^1][^4] + +The funding connects the Dark Enlightenment intellectual current to the [[PayPal Mafia]] commercial network through a single recurring capital relationship. Yarvin's arguments are funded by the principal whose commercial firms ([[Palantir Technologies|Palantir Technologies]], [[Founders Fund|Founders Fund]], the [[Dialog]] convening network) operationalize the privatization-of-state-capacity thesis Yarvin articulates. The 2026 Dialog leak did not name Yarvin as a registrant.[^4] + +### Urbit and the Software Project + +Yarvin's parallel project is [[Urbit]], a personal-server computing stack he began developing in 2002 and continued through his writing career. Urbit is a decentralized peer-to-peer network in which each user owns a permanent digital address (a "planet," "star," or "galaxy" in Urbit's hierarchy) as a digital asset, with the architecture intended to make the user sovereign over their own computing environment rather than dependent on centralized cloud providers.[^1] + +Urbit's development was housed at Yarvin's company Tlon until his departure, and the project has continued under subsequent stewardship. Yarvin's writing is explicit that the computing architecture prototypes the political architecture: sovereign digital property held by individuals replaces the platform-mediated computing that Yarvin reads as a continuation of the democratic state's jurisdictional claim. The project extends neoreaction from a political program into a full-stack alternative institutional design.[^1] + +### Political Reception + +[[Steve Bannon]], during the first [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration, was reported to have read and discussed Yarvin's work. [[Michael Anton]] (a national-security official in both Trump administrations) has engaged publicly with neoreactionary arguments. [[JD Vance]], the Thiel-funded senator and current vice president, has been associated with the broader intellectual orbit, though Vance has publicly distanced himself from Yarvin's more extreme claims.[^4] + +Yarvin has spoken at the [[National Conservatism Conference]] and published in [[The American Mind]], the journal of the [[Claremont Institute]]. He has spoken publicly about his relationship with the Thiel network and about the neoreactionary current's trajectory from blog subculture into executive-branch adjacency under the second Trump administration.[^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Yarvin, Curtis (Moldbug). *Unqualified Reservations* (blog), April 2007 through 2014. Full chronological archive at https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/. Key posts: "The Ultracalvinist Hypothesis: In Perspective" (June 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/ultracalvinist-hypothesis-in/); "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" (April 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives/); "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations," Chapter 5: "The Modern Structure" (February 2009, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/02/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/); "Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century," Chapter 3 (November 27, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-3-what-we-have-and-whats-so/); "Why Carlyle Matters" (July 16, 2009, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters/); "The Path to (Dark) Enlightenment" (March 2013, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/03/the-path-to-dark-enlightenment/). +[^2]: Land, Nick. "The Dark Enlightenment" (series), 2012 onward. +[^3]: "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" is preserved in the Princeton University Digital Collections: https://digital-collections.princeton.edu/i/open-letter-openminded-progressives/item/a08ef362-6b48-4cf2-bfbc-5401855e0eea +[^4]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ ; and public reporting on the Thiel-Yarvin patronage and the neoreactionary orbit's presence in the second Trump administration. +[^5]: Yarvin, Curtis (Mencius Moldbug). "Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century," Chapter 3 (November 27, 2008). https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-3-what-we-have-and-whats-so/ . The "master encryption keys for the government's invincible robot armies," the "Sov" abbreviation, and the "clean, lean and mean revenue-extracting machine... loot" formulations are Yarvin's own; for the "formalism" and "exit over voice" doctrines see "A Formalist Manifesto" (April 2007) at the same archive. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Donald Trump.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Donald Trump.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..72b76dc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Donald Trump.md @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - DonaldTrump + - PeterThiel + - RepublicanParty + - President + - Palantir + - JDVance + - LeonardLeo + - DarkMoney + - FederalistSociety +alias: + - Donald John Trump +summary: "Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States whose two administrations functioned as the political vehicle through which the Peter Thiel commercial network, the Leonard Leo judicial-selection network, and the Jared Kushner Middle East network exercised documented federal power, including Palantir's expanded government contracting, the Federalist Society Supreme Court confirmations, and the Kushner-MBS relationship that produced the Abraham Accords." +born: 1946-06-14 +location: "Queens, New York City (born)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and 47th [[President of the United States]], serving 2017-2021 and 2025-present. His two administrations functioned as the political vehicle through which the [[Peter Thiel|Peter Thiel]] commercial network ([[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]] contracting expansion, [[Clearview AI]] seed funding, [[Founders Fund]] defense portfolio), the [[Leonard Leo|Leonard Leo]] judicial-selection network (the [[Neil Gorsuch|Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh|Kavanaugh]], [[Amy Coney Barrett|Barrett]] Supreme Court confirmations), and the [[Jared Kushner|Jared Kushner]] Middle East network ([[Abraham Accords|Abraham Accords]], U.S.-[[Saudi Arabia|Saudi Arabia]] arms sales, the documented [[Mohammed bin Salman|MBS]] WhatsApp channel) exercised documented federal power. Thiel spoke at the 2016 [[Republican National Convention|Republican National Convention]] endorsing Trump, served on the transition executive committee, and placed associates including [[Kevin Harrington|Kevin Harrington]] on the [[National Security Council|National Security Council]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### The 2016 Thiel Endorsement and the Transition + +Thiel endorsed Trump at the July 2016 Republican National Convention in [[Cleveland|Cleveland]], the first openly gay speaker at a Republican convention in sixteen years, and donated over one million dollars to Trump-supporting super PACs alongside the [[Mercer family|Mercer family]], the Republican donors who funded [[Breitbart|Breitbart]] and the [[Cambridge Analytica|Cambridge Analytica]] data operation. After the November 2016 election, Trump placed Thiel on the transition team's executive committee. Thiel used the position to place Harrington as Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council and a Thiel aide as White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer. *Politico* reported that companies Thiel backed, especially Palantir, stood to benefit from the transition role.[^1][^2][^4] + +The Mercer family connection was the other documented channel of the 2016 operation. [[Robert Mercer|Robert Mercer]] and his daughter [[Rebekah Mercer|Rebekah Mercer]] funded Breitbart News (where [[Steve Bannon|Steve Bannon]] served as executive chairman before becoming the Trump campaign CEO in August 2016), Cambridge Analytica (the data-targeting firm that deployed psychographic profiling of voters using Facebook data acquired through the [[ Aleksandr Kogan | Aleksandr Kogan / Joseph Chancellor ]] academic-researcher channel), and the [[Government Accountability Institute|Government Accountability Institute]] (the research nonprofit that produced *Clinton Cash*). The Mercer-Breitbart-Cambridge Analytica infrastructure was the documented digital-and-media backbone of the 2016 campaign, and the convergence with the Thiel commercial network (Palantir, Founders Fund) through the shared Trump support produced the documented 2016 alignment of the Silicon Valley billionaire network with the Republican political operation.[^4][^9] + +### The Palantir Contracting Expansion + +The first Trump administration produced the documented expansion of Palantir's government contracting. The [[U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement|ICE]] contracts (FALCON, ICM, ImmigrationOS, ELITE) expanded through the administration's immigration-enforcement escalation. The [[Customs and Border Protection|CBP]] and [[Department of Defense|DoD]] contracts grew alongside the border-enforcement and defense-spending increases. The [[In-Q-Tel|In-Q-Tel]]-seeded relationship between Palantir and the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] deepened as Palantir's Gotham platform became the standard data-fusion tool across multiple agencies. Thiel chaired Palantir throughout, while simultaneously placing associates in the NSC and running the [[Dialog]] convening network whose government-side attendees included the congressional oversight and military-command principals responsible for the agencies Palantir serves.[^3][^5] + +The second administration (2025-present) has extended the contracting expansion. ICE awarded Palantir the 30 million dollar [[ImmigrationOS|ImmigrationOS]] contract for the administration's mass-deportation operations. Palantir signed the January 2024 strategic partnership with the [[Israeli Ministry of Defense|Israeli Ministry of Defense]] for "war-related missions" in the [[Gaza war|Gaza war]], placing the [[Palantir Gotham|Gotham]] "AI-powered kill chain" platform in an active combat zone. The [[Anduril Industries|Anduril]] [[Sentry Tower|Sentry Tower]] deployment expanded to over 350 towers covering 30 percent of the southern border under a 363 million dollar CBP contract. The documented combination of Palantir (case management and targeting), Anduril (autonomous detection), and Clearview (facial identification) across the deportation and border-enforcement pipelines constitutes the commercial operation of the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel network]] against the documented target populations.[^3][^5][^10] + +### The Supreme Court and the Leo Network + +Trump's three Supreme Court appointments (Gorsuch 2017, Kavanaugh 2018, Barrett 2020) were selected and shepherded through the Leonard Leo / [[Federalist Society|Federalist Society]] pipeline. Leo advised Trump on all three selections and the [[Judicial Crisis Network|Judicial Crisis Network]] (now the [[Concord Fund|Concord Fund]]) dark-money operation funded the confirmation campaigns. The conservative supermajority produced by the confirmations has been the structural outcome that shapes U.S. law on reproductive rights, gun regulation, campaign finance, and executive power. The Leo operation and the Thiel operation overlap through the shared [[Teneo Network|Teneo Network]] institutional terrain and the shared 501(c)(4) dark-money infrastructure.[^6] + +The Kavanaugh confirmation (2018) was the most contested of the three and drew the he documented engagement of the Thiel-aligned political infrastructure. The confirmation followed the [[Christine Blasey Ford|Christine Blasey Ford]] sexual-assault allegations and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, and the conservative dark-money operation that funded the confirmation campaign (the JCN / Concord Fund network) spent millions on advertising and grassroots mobilization. Leo personally managed the confirmation strategy. The Kavanaugh confirmation solidified the conservative supermajority that produced the 2022 [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization|Dobbs]] decision overturning [[Roe v. Wade|Roe v. Wade]].[^6] + +### The Kushner Middle East Policy + +Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor, handled the Middle East portfolio that produced the Abraham Accords (2020 normalization agreements between [[Israel|Israel]] and the [[United Arab Emirates|UAE]], [[Bahrain|Bahrain]], [[Sudan|Sudan]], and [[Morocco|Morocco]]). The accords broke with the prior U.S. framework that had conditioned normalization on Israeli-Palestinian progress, and Kushner led the negotiation alongside the administration's recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the [[Golan Heights|Golan Heights]] and the relocation of the U.S. embassy to [[Jerusalem|Jerusalem]].[^7] + +The U.S.-Saudi Arabia arms sales proceeded over congressional opposition, with the administration invoking emergency authority to bypass the congressional review process. The arms sales ran through the period of the [[Jamal Khashoggi|Khashoggi]] murder (October 2018), after which the CIA assessed with high confidence that MBS had ordered the assassination. Kushner maintained his relationship with MBS after the murder and maintained the WhatsApp channel the CIA assessed as compromised.[^7] + +After the administration ended, the [[Public Investment Fund|Saudi sovereign wealth fund]] committed 2 billion dollars to Kushner's [[Affinity Partners|Affinity Partners]] fund despite the fund's own due-diligence panel rejecting the deal as "unsatisfactory in all aspects." The Kushner-MBS channel, the [[NSO Group|NSO Group]] Pegasus surveillance of Khashoggi's associates, and the Abraham Accords together constitute the documented Middle East policy outcome.[^7] + +### The 2024 Campaign and the Second Administration + +Thiel funded the 2022 [[JD Vance|JD Vance]] Senate campaign (approximately fifteen million dollars) and the [[Blake Masters|Blake Masters]] campaign (approximately fifteen million dollars), and brokered Vance's selection as Trump's 2024 vice-presidential running mate. The Vance selection compressed a three-and-a-half-year path from private citizen to Vice President on a single-donor financial base.[^1][^3] + +The [[Heritage Foundation|Heritage Foundation]]'s [[Project 2025|Project 2025]] produced the personnel pipeline for the second administration. [[ProPublica|ProPublica]] reported that [[Paul Dans|Paul Dans]], the Project 2025 director, created a personnel database of over 10,000 vetted candidates ("a conservative LinkedIn") to staff a second Trump term. [[NBC News|NBC News]] reported that several prominent Project 2025 authors secured executive-branch roles. [[Center for American Progress|CAP]] documented that 80 percent of Project 2025's authors were former Trump administration officials or close advisors, and 140 people who worked for Trump contributed to the project. Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign but the personnel overlap is documented.[^1][^9] + +The second Trump administration (2025-present) has produced the documented expansion of Palantir's ICE contracting (the 30 million dollar ImmigrationOS contract), the Palantir-Israel strategic partnership for "war-related missions" in the Gaza war, and the [[Department of Government Efficiency|DOGE]] access to federal systems. [[David Sacks|David Sacks]], the PayPal Mafia COO, received the White House AI and cryptocurrency czar appointment. The DOGE, led by [[Elon Musk|Musk]], produced the documented [[NLRB Data Exfiltration|NLRB data exfiltration]] with Russian IP login attempts and the documented exfiltration of union-organizing records.[^1][^3][^8] + +[[Howard Lutnick|Howard Lutnick]], the [[Cantor Fitzgerald|Cantor Fitzgerald]] CEO whose Epstein emails are documented in the 2026 file releases, received the [[Secretary of Commerce|Secretary of Commerce]] appointment. [[Pam Bondi|Pam Bondi]], who declared the [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]] files release "complete" amid the "300 names" controversy (which included impossible entries for [[Elvis Presley|Elvis]], [[Princess Diana|Princess Diana]], and [[Kurt Cobain|Kurt Cobain]]), received the [[Attorney General|Attorney General]] appointment. [[Todd Blanche|Todd Blanche]], the deputy attorney general who announced the 3.5 million page Epstein-files publication, was previously Trump's personal defense attorney in the Manhattan criminal case. The second-administration personnel pattern places documented Epstein-network contacts (Lutnick) and Epstein-files oversight figures (Bondi, Blanche) in the executive branch.[^1] + +### The Epstein Relationship + +Trump and Epstein socialized from the late 1980s through 2004, mostly in [[Palm Beach, Florida|Palm Beach]] and New York. Archival [[NBC]] footage from 1992 shows the two men together at [[Mar-a-Lago]] watching dancers, with [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] present, and photographs place Trump, [[Melania Trump]], Epstein, and Maxwell together in the period. In a 2002 [[New York Magazine]] profile Trump said of Epstein, "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," adding that "he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Epstein's address books listed multiple Trump telephone numbers, and Trump's name appears roughly seven times in the flight logs of Epstein's aircraft (the [[Lolita Express]]) on domestic legs, with no log entry placing Trump on [[Little St. James]].[^11] + +The relationship broke in 2004 over a Palm Beach property. In November 2004 Trump outbid Epstein for the oceanfront mansion [[Maison de l'Amitie]], paying 41.35 million dollars, and the bankruptcy trustee for the estate described the two men lobbying him and disparaging each other's finances. Trump later said he had a falling out with Epstein "a long time ago" and had thrown him out of Mar-a-Lago as "persona non grata" for poaching club staff. Little public record of contact survives after 2004. [[Maria Farmer]], who reported Epstein to the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] in 1996, said she had also flagged a 1990s encounter involving Trump, an account that remains an uncorroborated allegation. No allegation of criminal wrongdoing by Trump in connection with Epstein has been established in any court or official finding.[^12] + +The relationship returned as a political liability across 2025. As president, Trump presided over the Justice Department that handled the file releases; he denied authoring the 2003 "birthday book" letter that the [[Wall Street Journal]] reported bore his signature and a drawing of a nude woman, dismissed the report as fake, and filed a multibillion-dollar defamation suit against the paper. After months of pressure from members of his own coalition demanding disclosure, Trump signed the [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]] in November 2025. The staged releases, the missing "client list" that Bondi had promised, and the unexplained redactions kept the Trump-Epstein history in continuous national coverage through the end of 2025.[^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Thiel's 2016 endorsement, the RNC speech, and the transition team role, see the contemporaneous press (*Guardian*, *Politico*, *ABC News*) and the Peter Thiel page. +[^2]: "Peter Thiel goes 'big league', joining Trump's presidential transition team." *The Guardian,* November 11, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/11/peter-thiel-joins-donald-trump-transition-team ; "Thiel could gain from Trump transition." *Politico,* December 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/peter-thiel-trump-transition-benefits-232233 +[^3]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^4]: "Who Is Kevin Harrington, the Peter Thiel Associate Who Just Joined the National Security Council Staff?" *Gizmodo,* February 2017. https://gizmodo.com/who-is-kevin-harrington-the-peter-thiel-associate-who-1791925769 ; "Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel's Influence is Shaping the National Security Council." *Just Security,* 2017. https://www.justsecurity.org/37466/disrupting-white-house-peter-thiels-influence-shaping-national-security-council/ +[^5]: "ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants' Movements." *American Immigration Council,* April 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/ ; "ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations." *The Register,* April 21, 2025. https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/21/ice_enlists_palantir_to_develop/ +[^6]: "We Don't Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right's Supreme Court Supermajority." *ProPublica,* March 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority +[^7]: "Chairwoman Maloney Launches Probe of Saudi Government's $2 Billion Investment in Affinity Partners." House Committee on Oversight, June 2, 2022, citing the PIF screening panel that rated the firm's due diligence "unsatisfactory in all aspects" before MBS overruled it. https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairwoman-maloney-launches-probe-of-saudi-government-s-2-billion-investment-in +[^8]: "Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data." *NPR,* April 15, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security ; "User with Russian IP address tried to log into NLRB systems following DOGE access, whistleblower says." *Nextgov/FCW,* April 2025. https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-ip-address-tried-log-nlrb-systems-following-doge-access-whistleblower-says/404574/ +[^9]: For the Mercer-Breitbart-Cambridge Analytica infrastructure, see the contemporaneous press coverage of the 2016 campaign digital operation and the Cambridge Analytica documentation. For the Government Accountability Institute and *Clinton Cash*, see the published record. For Project 2025: "Paul Dans, the Man Behind Project 2025's Most Radical Plans." *ProPublica.* https://www.propublica.org/article/project-2025-trump-campaign-heritage-foundation-paul-dans ; "The key Project 2025 authors now staffing the Trump administration." *NBC News.* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/key-project-2025-authors-now-staffing-trump-administration-rcna195107 +[^10]: "Anduril Wins $363 Million CBP Contract to Deploy Over 200 Extended Range AI Surveillance Towers." *The Defense News,* 2025. https://www.thedefensenews.com/Anduril-Wins-363-Million-CBP-Contract-to-Deploy-Over-200-Extended-Range-AI-Surveillance-Towers/ ; "CBP to strengthen 'tactical targeting,' 'counter-network analysis' with Clearview AI." *FedScoop,* 2026. https://fedscoop.com/dhs-cbp-contract-biometric-facial-recognition-ai/ +[^11]: "Trump called Epstein a 'terrific guy' who enjoyed 'younger' women before denying relationship with him." *Washington Post,* July 8, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-called-epstein-a-terrific-guy-before-denying-relationship-with-him/2019/07/08/a01e0f00-a1be-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html ; "Trump and Epstein: A Timeline of Their Relationship." *Time,* 2025. https://time.com/7333365/trump-epstein-relationship-timeline/ +[^12]: "What we know about the Trump-Epstein falling out." *PolitiFact,* July 31, 2025. https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jul/31/what-we-know-about-the-trump-epstein-falling-out/ ; "President Donald Trump explains why he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago." *Fox News,* 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epstein-thrown-out-mar-a-lago-hiring-help-trump +[^13]: "Birthday letter to Epstein bore Trump's signature, drawing of naked woman, Wall Street Journal reports." *CNN,* July 17, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/17/politics/epstein-birthday-letter-trump ; U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Files Transparency Act disclosures. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Eliezer Yudkowsky.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Eliezer Yudkowsky.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ed61e393 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Eliezer Yudkowsky.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - Rationalism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - MIRI + - PeterThiel + - Transhumanism + - LessWrong +alias: + - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky +summary: "Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American writer and self-taught artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote the foundational texts of the LessWrong rationalist movement, was funded for a decade by Peter Thiel, and in 2025 was named by Thiel as an example of the technology-stopping 'Antichrist.'" +born: 1979-09-11 +location: "Berkeley, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Eliezer Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American writer and artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (originally the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in 2000 and authored the body of online writing that founded the [[Rationalist Community]] and the [[LessWrong]] subculture. An autodidact who left formal education before high school, Yudkowsky built his influence through prolific blogging on cognitive bias, decision theory, and the argument that an unaligned superintelligent machine would by default cause human extinction. [[Peter Thiel]] funded his work from 2005 and cofounded the [[Singularity Summit]] with him in 2006.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Career and Writings + +Yudkowsky founded the Singularity Institute at the age of twenty to work on what he called "Friendly AI." Between 2006 and 2009 he wrote the "Sequences," a multi-year run of essays on rationality, probability, and bias, first on the economics blog [[Overcoming Bias]] and then on LessWrong, the community forum he launched in 2009. The essays were later collected as *Rationality: From AI to Zombies* and became the canonical text of the rationalist subculture.[^2][^4] + +In 2010 Yudkowsky began publishing *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality*, a long work of fan fiction that dramatized his rationality program and served as one of the movement's most effective recruitment vehicles, drawing readers into LessWrong and the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] workshops. His later technical work centered on decision theory and AI alignment.[^4] + +### The Thiel Funding + +Thiel began donating to the Singularity Institute in 2005 and the following year joined Yudkowsky and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]] to found the Singularity Summit. Thiel delivered keynotes at the summit and became the institute's most prominent early backer, with cumulative donations later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars. The funding ran through the period in which the institute relocated its community to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] and the in-person rationalist scene took shape.[^3][^5] + +Thiel's support ended in disillusionment. He later said the researchers he had funded had drifted "from transhumanism to Luddite," wanting to slow technological development rather than accelerate it. The break became public in 2025.[^1] + +### Doom Advocacy and the 2023 Time Essay + +By the early 2020s Yudkowsky had concluded that the AI-alignment problem would not be solved before the technology became dangerous, and he shifted to public advocacy for halting frontier AI development. The *Time* essay, published March 29, 2023, was written as an explanation of why he had declined to sign the [[Future of Life Institute]]'s "Pause Giant AI Experiments" open letter earlier that month: he regarded its call for a six-month pause as understating the danger and asking for too little. He called instead for an indefinite, internationally enforced moratorium on large training runs, the shutting down of all large GPU clusters, a cap on computing power any single actor could assemble, and a willingness to "destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike," writing that nations should run "some risk of nuclear exchange" rather than allow an unaligned superintelligence to be built.[^6] + +In September 2025 Yudkowsky and Nate Soares published *If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All* through Little, Brown and Company, arguing that the default outcome of building superhuman AI is loss of human control and extinction because modern systems are opaque trained neural networks rather than hand-written code. The book reached the *New York Times* best-seller list on October 5, 2025, carried endorsements ranging from the actor Stephen Fry to a former senior director of the White House National Security Council, and was cited in the United States Congress and the House of Lords.[^9] + +### Thiel's "Antichrist" Denunciation + +In a private four-part lecture series on the [[Antichrist]] delivered at the [[Commonwealth Club]] in [[San Francisco]] in September and October 2025, recordings of which were obtained by the *Washington Post*, Thiel named Yudkowsky as a contemporary example of the figure his lectures described as the Antichrist, a Luddite who "wants to stop all science." In the September 15 opening lecture Thiel said, "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or Eliezer," grouping Yudkowsky with [[Greta Thunberg]] and, in the *Washington Post* account, with the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] as "legionnaires of the Antichrist" who "argue for world government to stop science." Thiel said he was embarrassed by his earlier funding of Yudkowsky and that the AI critic and others like him had become "deranged."[^1][^7][^8] + +Thiel's argument inverted the structure of Yudkowsky's own thesis. Where Yudkowsky's *Time* essay had called for an internationally enforced halt to AI development, Thiel cast exactly that demand for global coordination to "stop science" as the mechanism by which a one-world technocratic state, the Antichrist in his reading of the Book of Revelation and the political theology of [[Carl Schmitt]], would seize total control under the banner of safety. The *Reason* writer who reviewed more than seven hours of the leaked recordings characterized the lectures as "surprisingly libertarian," with Thiel treating calls for AI regulation and global governance as a greater danger than uncontrolled technological acceleration.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Peter Thiel Thinks the Antichrist Is 'Someone Like' This AI Doomer That He Funded," *Gizmodo,* October 2025. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-thinks-the-antichrist-is-someone-like-this-ai-doomer-that-he-funded-2000671027 +[^2]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Rationality: From AI to Zombies* (collected "Sequences," 2006 through 2009). Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. +[^3]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit. +[^4]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,* serialized 2010 through 2015. +[^5]: "Peter Thiel (Funder)," reported cumulative donations to the Singularity Institute exceeding 1.6 million dollars; cross-referenced against the MIRI donation timeline at timelines.issarice.com. +[^6]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down." *Time,* March 29, 2023. https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/ +[^7]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ +[^8]: "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures. They're surprisingly libertarian." *Reason,* October 14, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/ +[^9]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer, and Nate Soares. *If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.* Little, Brown and Company, September 16, 2025; *New York Times* best-seller list, October 5, 2025. diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/JD Vance.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/JD Vance.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e35098b3 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/JD Vance.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +category: "Political Figure" +tags: + - Person + - JDVance + - PeterThiel + - Trump + - RepublicanParty + - Ohio + - VicePresident + - HillbillyElegy +alias: + - James David Vance + - J.D. Vance + - James Donald Bowman +summary: "JD Vance is an American politician, author, and venture capitalist who was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio in 2022 with approximately fifteen million dollars in super PAC funding from Peter Thiel, and was elected Vice President of the United States on the 2024 Republican ticket with Donald Trump." +born: 1984-08-02 +location: "Middletown, Ohio (born); Ohio (political base)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +JD Vance (born James Donald Bowman, August 2, 1984, in [[Middletown, Ohio|Middletown]], [[Ohio]]) is an American politician, author, and venture capitalist who served as U.S. Senator from Ohio from 2023 to 2025 and as Vice President of the United States from January 2025 under [[Donald Trump]]. Vance's political career was built on the financial backing of [[Peter Thiel]], who employed him at [[Mithril Capital]] from 2017, donated approximately fifteen million dollars to the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC supporting his 2022 Senate primary, and introduced him to the Trump network that produced his 2024 vice-presidential nomination. Vance's 2016 memoir *Hillbilly Elegy* made him a public figure before he held office.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Early Life, Military Service, and Education + +Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, and raised in a working-class family of Appalachian (Scots-Irish) heritage that had migrated from [[Kentucky]] eastern coal country to southwest Ohio. His mother struggled with substance dependence; he was raised principally by his maternal grandmother, Bonnie Vance, whom he calls "Mamaw" in the memoir. He enlisted in the [[United States Marine Corps]] after high school and served as a combat correspondent, including a deployment to [[Iraq]] in 2005.[^4] + +After the Marine Corps, Vance attended [[Ohio State University]] and then [[Yale Law School]], where he graduated in 2013. At Yale he studied under the constitutional law professor [[Amy Chua]], who became a mentor and who encouraged the memoir project that became *Hillbilly Elegy*. The Yale network introduced him to the venture-capital and elite-law orbits he would move through before entering politics.[^4] + +### Hillbilly Elegy and the Public Profile + +Vance's memoir *Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis* was published by [[Harper (publisher)|Harper]] in 2016, two months before the [[2016 presidential election|2016 election]]. The book framed his family's experience as a window into the white working-class communities that had shifted toward Trump, and it was widely read as an explanatory text for the Trump coalition. The book sold over three million copies and was adapted into a 2020 [[Netflix]] film directed by [[Ron Howard]].[^4] + +The memoir's reception divided along ideological lines. Critics argued Vance offered a cultural explanation (work ethic, family breakdown, substance dependence) for conditions that were primarily economic (deindustrialization, opioid marketing, policy choices), and that the book licensed a blame-the-poor framing among elite readers. Supporters argued the book accurately described the social collapse of Appalachian-origin communities in the Ohio River valley. Vance's own politics shifted over the period: he was a self-described "never Trump" Republican in 2016, writing that Trump was "cultural heroin" for the working class, before becoming one of Trump's most prominent defenders and, ultimately, his running mate.[^4][^5] + +### Mithril Capital and the Thiel Employment + +In 2017 Thiel hired Vance at Mithril Capital, the venture capital firm Thiel cofounded with [[Ajay Royan]]. Vance moved to [[San Francisco]] and worked at Mithril until 2019, when he returned to Ohio to found his own venture firm, [[Narya Capital]], backed by Thiel and by the [[Mercer family]], the Republican donors who had funded [[Breitbart]] and the 2016 Trump campaign.[^2][^3] + +The Thiel employment was the institutional channel through which Vance entered the Thiel network and through which the later political funding flowed. Thiel's biographical investment in Vance predates the Senate campaign: the Mithril hire placed Vance inside the Thiel commercial orbit, the Narya backing placed him inside the Thiel-Mercer donor network, and the Protect Ohio Values funding operationalized both relationships in the 2022 primary. Vance also sat on the board of [[AppHarvest]], an agricultural-technology company, during this period.[^2] + +### The 2022 Senate Campaign and the Protect Ohio Values PAC + +Vance announced his candidacy for the [[United States Senate|U.S. Senate]] seat from Ohio in July 2021, seeking the Republican nomination to succeed the retiring senator [[Rob Portman]]. The [[Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC had been formed the previous month to support a prospective Vance bid. On March 15, 2021, *The Cincinnati Enquirer* and other outlets reported, on the basis of the super PAC's federal disclosure, that Thiel had donated ten million dollars to Protect Ohio Values. The contribution was reported at the time as the largest single-donor contribution to a super PAC at that stage of a Senate primary.[^1][^6] + +Thiel subsequently increased his total contribution to approximately fifteen million dollars across the 2022 cycle. The super PAC spent approximately 11.8 million dollars supporting Vance in the May 3, 2022 Republican primary, which Vance won with 32 percent of the vote in a seven-candidate field. [[OpenSecrets]] reported that a Thiel-tied dark-money group, [[Per Aspera Policy]], steered an additional 200,000 dollars to the super PAC alongside Thiel's direct contributions. Vance won the November 2022 general election against the Democratic nominee [[Tim Ryan (Ohio politician)|Tim Ryan]] and took office in January 2023.[^1][^7][^8] + +The [[Campaign Legal Center]] filed a complaint with the [[Federal Election Commission]] in June 2022 alleging that Protect Ohio Values had illegally coordinated with the Vance campaign in violation of the super PAC independent-expenditure rules. The FEC dismissed the complaint in 2024. The Campaign Legal Center's complaint document is part of the public record.[^9] + +### The 2024 Vice-Presidential Nomination + +Trump selected Vance as his running mate on July 15, 2024, the opening day of the [[2024 Republican National Convention]] in [[Milwaukee]]. The selection was reported to have been brokered in part through the Thiel network: Thiel had advocated for Vance within the Trump orbit, and the prior five million dollars in additional super PAC spending and the Senate seat itself had established Vance as a viable national candidate within two years of his first run for office. Vance was elected Vice President on November 5, 2024, and inaugurated January 20, 2025.[^2] + +Vance went from private citizen to U.S. Senator to Vice President within roughly three and a half years, on a financial base supplied by a single donor. No comparable single-donor-driven trajectory from outside office to the vice presidency exists in the modern period. The Protect Ohio Values PAC filings, the Campaign Legal Center complaint, and the OpenSecrets analysis together constitute the documentary record of the funding mechanism.[^1][^7][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Super PAC supporting potential Senate candidate J.D. Vance gets $10M donation from Peter Thiel." *Cincinnati Enquirer,* March 15, 2021. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/03/15/super-pac-supporting-possible-ohio-senate-candidate-j-d-vance-gets-10-m-donation-peter-thiel/4700540001/ +[^2]: "The billionaire who fueled JD Vance's rapid rise to the Trump VP spot." *CBS News,* 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-trump-vp-peter-thiel-billionaire/ +[^3]: "A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel's big risk: How J.D. Vance won the Ohio primary." *Politico,* May 3, 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/03/jd-vance-win-ohio-primary-00029881 +[^4]: Vance, J.D. *Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.* Harper, 2016. +[^5]: Vance's 2016 "never Trump" statements and the subsequent reversal are documented in contemporaneous press, including his own [[The Atlantic|Atlantic]] and Facebook posts from 2016, which he has since disavowed. +[^6]: "Peter Thiel's Huge Donation Backing J.D. Vance Could Upend the Ohio Senate Race." *Mother Jones,* March 2021. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/peter-thiels-huge-donation-backing-j-d-vance-could-upend-the-ohio-senate-race/ +[^7]: "Super PAC discloses raising, spending millions helping J.D. Vance." *Cleveland.com,* July 2022. https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/07/super-pac-discloses-raising-spending-millions-helping-jd-vance-win-ohios-us-senate-republican-primary.html +[^8]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ +[^9]: Campaign Legal Center. FEC complaint against JD Vance for Senate and Protect Ohio Values PAC, June 2022. https://campaignlegal.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/Vance%2520POV%2520Complaint%2520%2528Final%2529.pdf ; "FEC Lets Peter Thiel-Funded Super PAC Off the Hook." *Business Insider,* May 2024. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-super-pac-jd-vance-ohio-fec-ruling-2024-5 diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Jaan Tallinn.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Jaan Tallinn.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bfa1ece7 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Jaan Tallinn.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - JaanTallinn + - ArtificialIntelligence + - ExistentialRisk + - EffectiveAltruism + - Investor +alias: + - Jaan Tallinn +summary: "Jaan Tallinn is the Estonian programmer who helped build Kazaa and Skype and turned the resulting fortune into the largest private funding stream for AI-safety and existential-risk work, cofounding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute and backing Anthropic and DeepMind." +born: 1972-02-14 +location: "Tallinn, Estonia" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Jaan Tallinn (born February 14, 1972) is an [[Estonia|Estonian]] programmer and investor who was a founding engineer of the file-sharing application [[Kazaa]] and of [[Skype]], and who used the wealth from those companies to become one of the largest private funders of work on existential risk and artificial-intelligence safety. He cofounded the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]] (2012) and the [[Future of Life Institute]] (2014), is a longtime donor to the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], was an early investor in [[DeepMind]] and led the 2021 Series A of [[Anthropic]], and channels much of his giving through the [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]].[^1][^2] + +### Kazaa, Skype, and the Fortune + +Tallinn studied theoretical physics at the [[University of Tartu]] and in the 1990s worked as a programmer for a small Estonian software company, where he and colleagues including Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu built software that the Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis commercialized. Their first product was Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing program released in 2001 that became one of the most downloaded applications of its era. The same Estonian engineering team then repurposed the peer-to-peer architecture for voice traffic, producing Skype, which launched in 2003 and turned internet telephony into a mass-market product.[^1][^3] + +Skype was acquired by [[eBay]] in September 2005 for about 2.6 billion dollars, the transaction that converted Tallinn's founding stake into a fortune. eBay later wrote down the value of the unit and in 2009 sold a majority stake to an investor group led by [[Silver Lake]]; [[Microsoft]] then bought Skype outright in 2011 for roughly 8.5 billion dollars, at the time its largest acquisition. Tallinn has since invested more than 100 million dollars across more than 100 technology startups, and financial press has described him as one of the most prolific early backers of artificial-intelligence companies.[^3][^4] + +### From the Singularity to Existential Risk + +Tallinn dates his concern with artificial intelligence to reading the online writings of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] in the late 2000s, after which he began to treat advanced AI as a potential threat to human survival rather than a commercial opportunity. He became an early and recurring donor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Berkeley organization Yudkowsky cofounded, giving it more than a million dollars across grants beginning around 2015, and to the Future of Humanity Institute, the [[University of Oxford]] research center founded by the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] whose book "Superintelligence" framed much of the field.[^2][^5] + +His worldview overlaps heavily with [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism]], the movements that argue resources should be directed toward reducing low-probability, high-consequence risks to the long-term future. Tallinn has framed his investment philosophy as an attempt to "displace money that doesn't care," putting his own capital into AI companies so that safety-minded shareholders sit alongside purely commercial ones. By 2023 he was publicly describing this strategy as having failed, telling [[Semafor]] that the labs he backed would not support a pause on frontier development and that he had shifted toward advocating government-imposed limits on the computing power used to train AI systems.[^5][^6] + +### CSER and the Future of Life Institute + +In 2012 Tallinn cofounded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at [[Cambridge University]] together with the philosopher [[Huw Price]] and the cosmologist [[Martin Rees]], after a chance meeting with Price in a Copenhagen taxi led to a collaboration on risks from advanced technology. He supplied the initiative's early private funding and remains associated with the center, which studies catastrophic risks from AI, biotechnology, and environmental collapse.[^1][^7] + +Two years later, in March 2014, he was among the cofounders of the Future of Life Institute near Boston alongside the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] physicist [[Max Tegmark]], the researcher [[Viktoriya Krakovna]], the physicist [[Anthony Aguirre]], and [[Meia Chita-Tegmark]]. FLI became one of the most visible AI-risk organizations, organizing the 2015 Puerto Rico and 2017 Asilomar conferences and publishing the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. Tallinn has served on its board and remained among its backers.[^7][^8] + +### DeepMind and Anthropic + +Tallinn was one of the individual investors in DeepMind, the London AI laboratory founded in 2010 by [[Demis Hassabis]], [[Shane Legg]], and [[Mustafa Suleyman]]; he put money into its early funding around 2011 alongside [[Elon Musk]], [[Peter Thiel]], [[Founders Fund]], and [[Horizons Ventures]], and DeepMind was acquired by [[Google]] in 2014 for a reported sum above 500 million dollars. He has said his motive was to gain visibility into and influence over a project he considered dangerous rather than to profit from it.[^4][^9] + +In May 2021 Tallinn led the 124-million-dollar Series A of Anthropic, the AI company founded by [[Dario Amodei]] and [[Daniela Amodei]] after they left [[OpenAI]]. Anthropic's own announcement of the round, dated May 28, 2021, named Tallinn as the lead and listed participation from [[James McClave]], [[Dustin Moskovitz]], the [[Center for Emerging Risk Research]], and former Google chief executive [[Eric Schmidt]]; the company was valued at roughly 623 million dollars at the time. As Anthropic's valuation climbed into the tens of billions of dollars over the following years, the early stake became one of the most valuable bets of Tallinn's investing career.[^10][^11] + +### The Survival and Flourishing Fund + +Since 2019 Tallinn has routed much of his existential-risk giving through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, a grant-allocation vehicle that uses a software-assisted method called the S-process to distribute money to longtermist and AI-safety organizations. The fund has organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts across its rounds, and Tallinn is consistently named as its principal funder. He was included in the 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list for this body of giving.[^2][^12] + +He also holds a number of advisory roles connected to AI governance, including membership on the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and on the board of the Center for AI Safety, and he sits on the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has continued to fund and speak for the view that uncontrolled development of superintelligent systems is among the leading threats to humanity's survival.[^1][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Jaan Tallinn," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk team page, University of Cambridge, on his cofounding of CSER with Huw Price and Martin Rees, his Skype and Kazaa background, and his advisory roles. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/jaan-tallinn/ +[^2]: "TIME100 Philanthropy: Jaan Tallinn," Time, 2026, on the Survival and Flourishing Fund directing roughly 150 million dollars to more than 300 projects, his MIRI giving, and his role founding FLI and CSER. https://time.com/collection/time100-philanthropy/2026/jaan-tallinn/ +[^3]: "Skype and Kazaa co-founder Jaan Tallinn on AI and the Singularity," Singularity Weblog, on the Estonian engineering team, Kazaa (2001), and Skype (2003). https://www.singularityweblog.com/jaan-tallinn/ +[^4]: "Jaan Tallinn: The Quiet Force Behind AI's Biggest Bets," Dealroom, on his more than 100 million dollars across more than 100 startups and his stakes in DeepMind and Anthropic. https://app.dealroom.co/news/note/jaan-tallinn-the-quiet-force-behind-ai-s-biggest-bets +[^5]: "Co-founder of Skype invested in hot AI startups but thinks he failed," Semafor, April 28, 2023, on his MIRI and FHI donations, the "displace money that doesn't care" philosophy, and his shift toward compute caps. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/28/2023/co-founder-of-skype-invested-in-hot-ai-startups-but-thinks-he-failed +[^6]: "Microsoft to Acquire Skype," Microsoft News, May 10, 2011, on the 8.5-billion-dollar Microsoft acquisition from the Silver Lake-led investor group; eBay's September 2005 acquisition of Skype for about 2.6 billion dollars and the later write-down. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2011/05/10/microsoft-to-acquire-skype-3/ +[^7]: "About Us," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and "Future of Life Institute," on the 2012 founding of CSER and the March 2014 founding of FLI with Tegmark, Krakovna, Aguirre, and Chita-Tegmark. https://www.cser.ac.uk/about-us/ +[^8]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on FLI's founding, conferences, and grant program. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/ +[^9]: "Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind For More Than $500M," TechCrunch, January 26, 2014, on DeepMind's 2010 founding, early investors including Tallinn, Musk, Thiel, Founders Fund, and Horizons Ventures, and the Google acquisition. https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/ +[^10]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 28, 2021, on Tallinn leading the Series A and the named participants James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, the Center for Emerging Risk Research, and Eric Schmidt. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems +[^11]: "Series A - Anthropic," Crunchbase, on the May 2021 round and the roughly 623-million-dollar valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/anthropic-series-a--61db4cbd +[^12]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund," on the S-process, Jaan Tallinn as principal funder, and the roughly 150 million dollars organized across rounds since 2019. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/John Tanton.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/John Tanton.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..af30211e --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/John Tanton.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "New Right" +tags: + - Person + - Immigration + - Nativism + - Eugenics + - PioneerFund + - WhiteNationalism +alias: + - John Hamilton Tanton +summary: "John Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who built the modern US anti-immigration movement, founding FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and the Social Contract Press, and whose WITAN memos, Pioneer Fund funding, and white-nationalist ties were documented by the New York Times and the SPLC." +born: 1934-02-23 +died: 2019-07-16 +location: "Petoskey, Michigan" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +John Tanton (February 23, 1934 to July 16, 2019) was a [[Michigan]] ophthalmologist who built the institutional core of the modern United States anti-immigration movement, founding or seeding the [[Federation for American Immigration Reform]] (FAIR), the [[Center for Immigration Studies]] (CIS), [[NumbersUSA]], [[U.S. English]], and the [[Social Contract Press]]. He moved from population-control environmentalism into immigration restriction, and his private papers, his WITAN memos, his correspondence with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and the [[Pioneer Fund]] money flowing to his organizations were documented by the [[New York Times]] and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]].[^1][^2] + +### From Environmentalism to Restriction + +A retired ophthalmologist based in [[Petoskey]], Tanton came to immigration through population-control activism, chairing the [[Sierra Club]] national population committee and leading [[Zero Population Growth]] in the 1970s. Concluding that domestic family planning alone could not stabilize the United States population, he turned to limiting immigration. In 1979 he founded FAIR, in 1983 he co-founded U.S. English to promote official-English policy, in 1985 he helped launch the Center for Immigration Studies as FAIR's research arm, and he later seeded NumbersUSA and the publishing house Social Contract Press through his umbrella nonprofit [[U.S. Inc.]] He also founded the English-only group [[ProEnglish]].[^1][^3] + +The network ran on a small number of wealthy backers, above all the Mellon-family heiress [[Cordelia Scaife May]], whom Tanton persuaded to put up a roughly $500,000 grant to launch FAIR in 1978. May created the [[Colcom Foundation]] in 1996 to continue the work, left it close to half her fortune on her death in 2005, and through it the foundation gave more than $120 million to anti-immigration groups between 2006 and 2016, including nearly $15 million to FAIR, over $17 million to NumbersUSA, and more than $6 million to the Center for Immigration Studies. Tanton had served earlier as president of [[Planned Parenthood]] of Northern Michigan, a sign of how far his trajectory carried him from family-planning liberalism to nativism.[^1][^6] + +### The WITAN Memos + +In October 1986 Tanton circulated a series of private memos to attendees of a strategy retreat he called WITAN, after the Anglo-Saxon "witenagemot." In them he warned of a coming "Latin onslaught" and asked, citing the Argentine maxim "Gobernar es poblar" (to govern is to populate), "Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?" He wrote that "as Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" and he questioned Latino "educability" and the influence of the Catholic Church. The memos were leaked in 1988 and forced resignations from U.S. English, including that of its president [[Linda Chavez]].[^2][^4] + +The *Arizona Republic* published excerpts on October 9, 1988. Chavez, then executive director of U.S. English, resigned calling the memos "repugnant" and "anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic," and board members including the broadcaster [[Walter Cronkite]] and the actor [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]] quit; Tanton himself stepped down from the group. The reaction at FAIR was the opposite: rather than disavow him, his colleagues there closed ranks and formed a committee to craft a defense of the memos, keeping Tanton at the center of the organization he had founded.[^2][^7] + +### Pioneer Fund and White-Nationalist Ties + +Between 1985 and 1994 FAIR accepted roughly 1.2 million dollars from the Pioneer Fund, the foundation created in 1937 by [[Wickliffe Draper]] to promote eugenics and "race betterment" and classified as a hate group by the SPLC. Tanton introduced FAIR leaders to the Pioneer Fund's president, and the same race-science network underwrote figures such as [[Richard Lynn]] and the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]]. Tanton corresponded with the white nationalist [[Jared Taylor]], the former Klan lawyer [[Sam Francis]], and Holocaust deniers, and wrote in a 1993 letter that to maintain American culture "a European-American majority" was required. His private papers, sealed at the [[University of Michigan]] until 2035, were partly reported by the SPLC and the Times.[^1][^2][^5] + +The "European-American majority" line came from a letter Tanton sent on December 10, 1993 to the ecologist [[Garrett Hardin]], author of the essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" and a fellow population-control hardliner. Tanton brought FAIR officials to a 1997 meeting at a private club to meet the Pioneer Fund's president [[Harry F. Weyher Jr.]], and a 1998 Tanton memo circulated a paper on "sub-replacement fertility" by the race scientist [[Roger Pearson]], who edited Mankind Quarterly and ran the Institute for the Study of Man. Through the Social Contract Press he published tracts by white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, knitting the immigration lobby to the same figures who staffed the organized race-science network.[^8][^9] + +### The Network + +Tanton's three flagship groups (FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA) became the dominant restrictionist voices in Washington, and the Social Contract Press published the racist French novel *[[The Camp of the Saints]]* in English, a book later promoted by [[Steve Bannon]]. The hereditarian and population-anxiety arguments in Tanton's circle ran parallel to the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] immigration writing of [[Steve Sailer]] and to the Pioneer Fund research network, placing the organized anti-immigration lobby and organized race science within a single web of funders and figures.[^1][^3] + +The Social Contract Press, edited by [[Wayne Lutton]], reprinted [[Jean Raspail]]'s *The Camp of the Saints* in 1987 and reissued it through the 1990s, with Tanton calling it "20 years ahead of its time." The novel became a touchstone of the "Great Replacement" current; in a September 6, 2015 email later leaked by the SPLC, the future Trump adviser [[Stephen Miller]] urged *[[Breitbart News]]* to write about the book, and a matching article ran 18 days later. Tanton's institutional architecture thereby fed directly into the immigration politics of the first [[Donald Trump]] administration, with personnel and ideas from FAIR and CIS staffing and shaping its restrictionist agenda.[^10][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Anti-Immigration Crusader," *The New York Times,* April 17, 2011, by Jason DeParle, on Tanton founding FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA, his environmentalist origins, and his correspondence with white nationalists. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html +[^2]: "John Tanton," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the WITAN memos, the Pioneer Fund funding, the "European-American majority" quote, and the white-nationalist ties. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/john-tanton/ +[^3]: "John Tanton, architect of anti-immigration and English-only efforts, dies at 85," *The Washington Post,* July 21, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-tanton-architect-of-anti-immigration-and-english-only-efforts-dies-at-85/2019/07/21/2301f728-aa3f-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html +[^4]: "WITAN Memo III," Southern Poverty Law Center, reproducing Tanton's October 1986 memo and its quotes on the "Latin onslaught," fertility, and "educability." https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/witan-memo-iii/ +[^5]: "Federation for American Immigration Reform's Hate Filled Track Record," Southern Poverty Law Center, on FAIR's 1.2 million dollars from the Pioneer Fund between 1985 and 1994. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/federation-american-immigration-reforms-hate-filled-track-record/ +[^6]: "Colcom Foundation, rooted in environmentalism, increasingly focuses on anti-immigration groups," *Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,* June 24, 2019, on Cordelia Scaife May, the Colcom Foundation, and its more than $120 million in anti-immigration grants between 2006 and 2016, with her funding of FAIR dating to 1978; Tanton's 1965 founding of a northern Michigan Planned Parenthood chapter is recorded in the John Tanton Papers at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2019/06/24/colcom-foundation-anti-immigration-grants-scaife-pittsburgh-trump-SPLC-hate-group/stories/201906230015 +[^7]: "Federation for American Immigration Reform," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the October 9, 1988 *Arizona Republic* excerpts, the Chavez, Cronkite, and Schwarzenegger resignations, and FAIR's defense of Tanton. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/federation-american-immigration-reform/ +[^8]: "John Tanton's Private Papers Expose More Than 20 Years of Hate," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the December 10, 1993 letter to Garrett Hardin, the 1997 meeting with the Pioneer Fund president, and the 1998 Roger Pearson memo. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/john-tantons-private-papers-expose-more-20-years-hate/ +[^9]: "Roger Pearson," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on Pearson's editing of Mankind Quarterly and his Institute for the Study of Man. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/roger-pearson +[^10]: "The Social Contract Press," The Plot Against Immigrants, on Wayne Lutton, the 1987 reprint of *The Camp of the Saints,* and Tanton's "20 years ahead of its time" praise. https://plotagainstimmigrants.com/network/the-social-contract-press/ +[^11]: "Miller Pushed Racist 'Camp of the Saints' Beloved by Far Right," Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch, November 2019, on Stephen Miller's September 6, 2015 Breitbart email and the matching article. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/miller-pushed-racist-camp-saints-beloved-far-right/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Leslie Wexner.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Leslie Wexner.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0b3ef67a --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Leslie Wexner.md @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +--- +category: "Crime & Abuse Networks" +tags: [Person, LesWexner, JeffreyEpstein, LBrands, VictoriasSecret, MegaGroup, Finance, NewAlbany] +alias: ["Les Wexner", "Leslie H. Wexner"] +summary: "Founder of The Limited and L Brands who granted Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney over his fortune in 1991 and later said Epstein misappropriated vast sums from him." +born: 1937-09-08 +location: New Albany, Ohio +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Leslie Herbert Wexner founded the Columbus, Ohio retailer The Limited in 1963 and built it into the holding company later known as [[L Brands]], owner of [[Victoria's Secret]], [[Bath & Body Works]], Lane Bryant and Express. From the late 1980s until around 2007 [[Jeffrey Epstein]] served as Wexner's personal financial adviser, and in 1991 Wexner granted Epstein a sweeping power of attorney over his finances.[^1] + +### Business Career + +Wexner opened the first Limited store in 1963 at the Kingsdale Shopping Center in Upper Arlington, near Columbus, using a 5,000 dollar loan from his aunt and 5,000 dollars borrowed from a bank.[^10] He named the shop The Limited because he limited its stock to women's sportswear and separates rather than carrying a full line of dresses and coats, and the store recorded first-year sales of about 160,000 dollars.[^10] Through the 1970s and 1980s he expanded it into a portfolio of mall retailers including The Limited, Limited Express and Lane Bryant.[^2] + +Wexner acquired Victoria's Secret in 1982 from founder [[Roy Raymond]] for about one million dollars, taking over five stores, a catalog and roughly six million dollars in annual sales from a company that was approaching bankruptcy.[^11] He recast the brand from a male-oriented novelty shop into a mass-market lingerie chain, inventing a fictional London address and remaking the catalog and store aesthetics, and by 1995 Victoria's Secret operated several hundred stores with sales in the billions.[^11] Raymond founded a children's retailer that failed and died by suicide in 1993.[^11] In 1990 Wexner launched Bath & Body Works, whose first store opened that September in a Cambridge, Massachusetts mall, and the personal-care brand grew into one of the company's largest divisions.[^12] The parent firm operated for decades as Limited Brands and was renamed L Brands in 2013.[^2] + +Wexner developed the village of [[New Albany, Ohio]] outside Columbus from rural land into an upscale planned suburb, building an estate there and steering corporate and residential development.[^3] Jeffrey Epstein became a general partner in the New Albany real estate holding company and, according to property records, held roles in entities tied to the development.[^3] In 1991 Wexner co-founded the [[Mega Group]], a private network of wealthy Jewish American philanthropists and businessmen, with Seagram heir [[Charles Bronfman]].[^4] The Wall Street Journal reported in 1998 that the group, which grew from about 20 founding members toward 50 and charged dues of roughly 30,000 dollars a year, met twice annually for seminars on philanthropy and Jewish affairs.[^13] + +### New Albany, Ohio + +Beginning in the 1980s Wexner bought up land in New Albany, then a Central Ohio village of a few hundred people about 20 minutes northeast of Columbus, partnering with developer [[Jack Kessler]] in an entity that the two men later formalized as the [[New Albany Company]].[^14] Locals nicknamed the planned town "Wexley," a portmanteau of Wexner and Bexley, the affluent Columbus suburb where he had previously lived, and the New Albany Company became the area's dominant landowner, holding roughly 80 percent of the municipality at points and shaping development through a public-private partnership with the local government.[^14] The village's population grew from about 1,600 in 1990 to more than 10,000, with a median household income several times the Ohio average.[^14] + +Epstein signed incorporation paperwork for the New Albany Company as its president alongside Wexner, according to Ohio state records, and owned a residence on the Wexner estate before the relationship ended in 2007.[^14] Wexner built a Georgian-style mansion on a roughly 336-acre estate along Kitzmiller Road that ranks among the largest private residences in Ohio.[^14] The New Albany Company later assembled a large business park along Route 161 and sold land to technology firms including Amazon, Facebook and Google, generating proceeds for a company subsidiary.[^14] + +### Wexner Foundation and Philanthropy + +Wexner established the [[Wexner Foundation]] and the related Wexner Heritage Foundation in 1984 to develop Jewish lay and professional leadership in North America and public-sector leaders in Israel.[^15] The foundation's programs include the Wexner Heritage Program, a two-year intensive Jewish learning course for young volunteer leaders, along with the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Wexner Israel Fellows and other tracks.[^15] Wexner also funded institutions at [[The Ohio State University]] and the [[Harvard Kennedy School]], where the Wexner-Israel Fellowship trained Israeli officials.[^15] + +Abigail Koppel, who became Abigail Wexner on her marriage to Wexner on January 23, 1993, practiced law at [[Davis Polk & Wardwell]] in New York and London from 1987 to 1992 before her philanthropic work in Columbus.[^16] Epstein drafted the prenuptial agreement for the marriage.[^5] In 2008 Epstein directed a portion of recovered funds toward a foundation associated with Abigail Wexner.[^8] + +### Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein + +Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein were introduced in the mid-1980s; later reporting placed the meeting around 1986 through insurance executive [[Robert Meister]], who had met Epstein on a flight to Palm Beach.[^5] Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser by 1987, and in July 1991 Wexner gave him a power of attorney that authorized Epstein to sign checks, borrow money, buy and sell property, and hire and fire on Wexner's behalf.[^1] A close Wexner adviser, [[Harold Levin]], reportedly warned that he did not trust Epstein, telling Wexner he "smell[ed] a rat," and at least one board member commissioned a background investigation, but Wexner continued the relationship.[^5] According to the New York Times account, Epstein later engineered Levin's firing by accusing him of stealing from Wexner, an accusation that would subsequently be leveled at Epstein himself.[^17] + +A New York Times Magazine investigation published December 16, 2025 traced Epstein's accumulation of wealth back to his hiring at [[Bear Stearns]] and his early targeting of wealthy businessmen, and detailed how his control over Wexner's accounts gave him unregulated access to fund real estate purchases, including property near [[Mar-a-Lago]] in Palm Beach, the [[9 East 71st Street]] townhouse in Manhattan, and the New Albany mansion.[^5] Epstein also drafted the prenuptial agreement for Wexner's marriage to [[Abigail Wexner|Abigail Koppel]] and obtained tax breaks for Epstein's [[Little St. James]] island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.[^5] The Times wrote that the central unanswered question was what Wexner gained from the relationship, and Wexner declined to participate in the investigation.[^17] + +In a February 2026 deposition before members of the House Oversight Committee, Wexner described himself as "naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein," calling him "a con man."[^6] He said he had revoked the power of attorney, removed Epstein from his accounts and terminated him in 2007, and that he was "neither a co-conspirator nor target" of investigators.[^18] JPMorgan Chase records cited in the released files placed the formal end of the financial relationship in February 2008, several months later than the 2007 date Wexner had publicly given.[^18] + +### The 9 East 71st Street Townhouse + +Wexner purchased the seven-story townhouse at 9 East 71st Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1989 for about 13.2 million dollars.[^7] The roughly 21,000-square-foot limestone mansion, one of the largest single-family residences in the city, had been built early in the twentieth century, and control of the property moved through a chain of corporate entities during the 1990s, with Jeffrey Epstein listed in various officer or trustee roles.[^7] The residence became Epstein's primary New York base and the site of much of the conduct later detailed in the federal sex-trafficking case against him.[^7] + +In 2011 the mansion was conveyed to Maple Inc., an Epstein-linked U.S. Virgin Islands entity, for zero dollars in recorded consideration; Epstein signed the transaction for both the seller and the buyer.[^7] Reporting at the time valued the property in the tens of millions of dollars, and the terms of the transfer were never fully explained publicly.[^7] A 1998 purchase and sale agreement underlying the transfer involved a 10 million dollar promissory note and personal guaranty signed by Epstein.[^5] + +An FBI internal memo among the files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act stated that "Epstein controlled all of Wexner's personal finances with virtually no oversight" and described how Epstein sold himself a New York home and a private plane that had belonged to Wexner at a "deeply discounted price."[^19] The transfers of the townhouse and aircraft to Epstein-controlled entities for nominal or discounted sums became central to later accounts of how Epstein converted his control of Wexner's affairs into personal assets.[^19] + +### Statements After Epstein's Arrest + +After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019, Wexner said he had severed ties around 2007 and that "in that process, we discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family."[^8] In a letter to his foundation, Wexner disclosed that Epstein had returned funds, and reporting indicated the recovered sum exceeded 46 million dollars, a portion of which Epstein directed in 2008 to a foundation associated with Abigail Wexner.[^8] A spokesperson declined to specify the total amount allegedly taken or whether it had been reported to authorities.[^9] + +Documents in the 2026 Epstein files described a larger figure than the 46 million dollars cited in 2019. An investigative memo recorded that Wexner's attorneys told investigators in 2008 that Epstein had repaid him about 100 million dollars, described as only a portion of what he had taken, and that Abigail Wexner had taken over the family's finances and found Epstein had misappropriated "several hundred million dollars."[^18] Wexner provided documents to investigators that he said showed Epstein's alleged theft, but he did not publicly detail the full scope.[^9] + +The released files showed that Wexner and Epstein remained in contact after 2007. Following the announcement of Epstein's 2008 Florida plea deal, Wexner wrote a note saying he felt sorry and reminding Epstein to "always be careful," to which Epstein replied "no excuse."[^18] An FBI email from August 2019 labeled Wexner a "secondary co-conspirator" while noting "limited evidence regarding his involvement," and a Fox News account reported that an internal FBI memo had characterized him as an Epstein co-conspirator.[^19] In January 2026 the House Oversight Committee moved to subpoena Wexner over his ties to Epstein, and he was deposed at his Ohio home in February 2026.[^6] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: Heather Long and Renae Merle, "Lawyers Question Wexner's Financial Arrangement With Jeffrey Epstein," *WOSU / NPR,* 2019. https://www.wosu.org/news/2019-08-08/lawyers-question-wexners-financial-arrangement-with-jeffrey-epstein +[^2]: "Les Wexner: How the billionaire enabled Jeffrey Epstein's rise," *Al Jazeera,* 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/les-wexner-how-the-billionaire-enabled-jeffrey-epsteins-rise +[^3]: "What do we know about Les Wexner and Epstein as deposition approaches?," *AOL / Columbus Dispatch,* 2026. https://www.aol.com/articles/know-les-wexner-epstein-deposition-193023473.html +[^4]: Frank, Robert. "The Mega Group, a Club of Wealthy Jewish Businessmen, Lends Its Power to Help Israel and Jews." *Wall Street Journal,* May 1998, on the 1991 founding by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman. +[^5]: "Les Wexner Was Warned About Epstein, And Other Things We Learned From the *Times* Investigation," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/epstein-investigation-times-report-finance-crimes-1235486388/ +[^6]: "Billionaire Les Wexner says he was 'duped' by adviser Jeffrey Epstein, 'a world-class con man,'" *13abc / WTVG,* 2026. https://www.13abc.com/2026/02/18/billionaire-les-wexner-says-he-was-duped-by-adviser-jeffrey-epstein-world-class-con-man/ +[^7]: "What the Records Show: The Townhouses on East 71st Street," summarizing NYC ACRIS deed records and 2019 reporting on the 2011 transfer to Maple Inc. https://www.habituallychic.luxury/2020/07/a-look-inside-9-east-71st-street/ +[^8]: "Victoria's Secret owner says disgraced financier Epstein stole $46M from him," *CBC,* 2019. https://amp.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.5240145 +[^9]: "L Brands CEO Les Wexner has been giving documents to investigators showing alleged Jeffrey Epstein theft," *CNBC,* 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/les-wexner-gives-feds-documents-showing-alleged-jeffrey-epstein-theft.html +[^10]: "Leslie Wexner," *Entrepreneur,* on the 1963 founding of The Limited at Kingsdale Shopping Center with a 5,000 dollar loan and first-year sales of about 160,000 dollars. https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/leslie-wexner/197714 +[^11]: "Victoria's Secret founding: Roy Raymond had a great idea, but Les Wexner was the one to see it through," *Slate,* 2013. https://slate.com/business/2013/10/victorias-secret-founding-roy-raymond-had-a-great-idea-but-les-wexner-was-the-one-to-see-it-through.html +[^12]: For the 1990 founding of Bath & Body Works within The Limited and the first store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, see the L Brands corporate history and contemporaneous retail trade press. +[^13]: Frank, Robert. "The Mega Group." *Wall Street Journal,* May 1998, reporting the group's membership and roughly 30,000 dollar annual dues. +[^14]: "How Les Wexner Created the Richest Town in Ohio," *Commercial Observer,* 2019, with NBC4 reporting on Epstein's incorporation role and residence on the estate. https://commercialobserver.com/2019/11/how-les-wexner-created-the-richest-town-in-ohio/ +[^15]: "Our Story," *The Wexner Foundation,* on the 1984 founding and the foundation's leadership programs. https://www.wexnerfoundation.org/our-story/ +[^16]: "Abigail S. Koppel," summarizing her legal career at Davis Polk & Wardwell (1987 to 1992) and the January 23, 1993 marriage to Wexner. https://www.thenexthint.com/abigail-s-koppel-wife-of-les-wexner/ +[^17]: "New York Times details how Les Wexner met sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as he built wealth," *WOSU Public Media,* 2025, summarizing the December 16, 2025 New York Times Magazine investigation. https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-12-16/new-york-times-details-how-les-wexner-met-sex-trafficker-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-built-wealth +[^18]: "Billionaire Les Wexner is being deposed in the Epstein files probe. Here's what documents show about their relationship," *PBS NewsHour,* 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/billionaire-les-wexner-is-being-deposed-in-the-epstein-files-probe-heres-what-documents-show-about-their-relationship +[^19]: "FBI memos, bank record, odd emails mention Wexner in new Epstein files," *AOL,* 2026, on the FBI memo language, the discounted home and plane, and the co-conspirator characterization. https://www.aol.com/articles/les-wexner-appears-latest-epstein-171239980.html diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Mark Zuckerberg.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Mark Zuckerberg.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3c07ddfb --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Mark Zuckerberg.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - MarkZuckerberg + - Facebook + - Meta + - PeterThiel + - SiliconValley +summary: "Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder and chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, whose first outside investor and longtime board member was Peter Thiel, and who realigned the company toward the Trump-era tech-right after the 2024 election." +born: 1984-05-14 +location: "Palo Alto, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is the cofounder and chief executive of [[Facebook]], renamed [[Meta Platforms|Meta]] in 2021, the social-media company he started at [[Harvard University]] in 2004 with [[Dustin Moskovitz]], [[Eduardo Saverin]], [[Chris Hughes]], and [[Andrew McCollum]]. [[Peter Thiel]] was the company's first outside investor and a member of its board for seventeen years, and Zuckerberg's network and trajectory intersect the [[Thiel Influence Network]] at several points, from the founding investment to the Trump-era political realignment.[^1][^2] + +### The Thiel Relationship + +Thiel made the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004, five hundred thousand dollars structured as a convertible note for about 10.2 percent of the company, valuing it near 4.9 million dollars, and joined its board in 2005. He sold large blocks at and after the May 2012 initial public offering, taking roughly 640 million dollars at the IPO and several hundred million more after the lockup expired in August 2012, and remained a director until February 2022, when he declined reelection to focus on funding pro-[[Donald Trump|Trump]] political candidates ahead of the midterms.[^1][^3] + +Thiel acted as an intermediary between Zuckerberg and the political right. He attended a previously undisclosed dinner with Zuckerberg and Trump in the Blue Room of the White House on October 22, 2019, organized on short notice and reported by NBC News a month later, during the week Zuckerberg testified to Congress on Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the meeting "corruption, plain and simple."[^6] + +### The Epstein Dinner + +An August 2015 dinner in Palo Alto, hosted by [[Reid Hoffman]] and reported by Vanity Fair in 2019, placed Zuckerberg at the same table as Thiel, [[Elon Musk]], and [[Joi Ito]] of the [[MIT Media Lab]], who brokered access to [[Jeffrey Epstein]]'s money and circle. Epstein emailed the financier Thomas Pritzker on August 20, 2015, "i had dinner with zuckerburg, mu=k, thiel hoffman, wild," and emailed himself a photograph from the gathering, both of which surfaced in the document releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act in late 2025 and early 2026. Releasers stressed that being named in the files is not evidence of wrongdoing.[^4][^7] + +Meta has disputed any closer connection, with a spokesman stating in 2019 that Zuckerberg "met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner" and "did not communicate with Epstein again." Hoffman apologized in September 2019 for participating in fundraising where Epstein was present, saying he had helped "repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice," while Musk has said he refused invitations to Epstein's island, a claim that reporters noted sits awkwardly against released 2012 to 2013 emails between Musk and Epstein. Ito resigned from the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Corporation, and other boards in September 2019 after Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that the lab had concealed millions of dollars in Epstein-linked donations, referring to him internally as "Voldemort."[^8][^9] + +### The 2025 Realignment + +After Trump's 2024 election, Zuckerberg moved Meta toward the tech-right. The company donated one million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund, having given nothing to the 2017 or 2021 inaugurations. On January 2, 2025 Meta replaced its policy chief Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, and on January 6 it added the Ultimate Fighting Championship head Dana White to its board. On January 7 it announced it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States for a "community notes" model and moving its content-moderation operations from California to Texas, and on January 10 it ended its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.[^5][^10] + +In a January 2025 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast Zuckerberg said corporate culture had tried to "get away from" "masculine energy," which he called "good," and that companies should "celebrate the aggression a bit more," signaling an alignment with the cultural politics promoted by the Thiel network and figures such as [[Mike Solana]] and [[Marc Andreessen]].[^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Peter Thiel to step down from board of Facebook parent Meta," *CNBC,* February 7, 2022, on the first investment, the 2005-2022 board tenure, and the Trump focus. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/07/peter-thiel-to-step-down-from-facebook-board.html +[^2]: "Tech billionaire Peter Thiel resigns from board of Facebook parent," *UPI,* February 7, 2022. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/02/07/billionaire-Peter-Thiel-resigns-board-Facebook/5311644280042/ +[^3]: "Peter Thiel to step down from Facebook's board," CNN Business, February 7, 2022, on Thiel as intermediary and the 2019 Trump-Zuckerberg dinner. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/07/tech/peter-thiel-facebook-board +[^4]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, cross-referencing the EFTA releases (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) for the 2015 dinner guest list. https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^5]: "Meta ends fact-checking program," contemporaneous press coverage of the January 2025 content-moderation and policy changes and the Trump inauguration donation. +[^6]: "Trump had a previously undisclosed dinner with Zuckerberg and Thiel," *NBC News,* November 20, 2019, on the October 22, 2019 White House dinner and Warren's response. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-zuckerberg-had-previously-undisclosed-dinner-white-house-n1087986 +[^7]: "Epstein emailed about a 2015 dinner with Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel," *Fortune,* 2026, on the "wild" email to Thomas Pritzker, the self-addressed photo, and the EFTA releases; the dinner first reported by *Vanity Fair,* 2019. https://fortune.com/2026/epstein-email-zuckerberg-musk-thiel-dinner/ +[^8]: "Meta says Zuckerberg met Epstein once," statements by spokesman Ben LaBolt, 2019; and Hoffman's September 12, 2019 apology, *Axios.* https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-apology +[^9]: Farrow, Ronan. "How an Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein," *The New Yorker,* September 6, 2019, on the MIT Media Lab donations and Ito's resignation. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein +[^10]: "Meta names Joel Kaplan as policy chief," *CNBC,* January 2, 2025; "Dana White joins Meta board," Meta Newsroom, January 6, 2025; "Meta ends fact-checking and moves moderation to Texas," *The Texas Tribune,* January 7, 2025; "Meta ends DEI programs," *CNBC,* January 10, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/02/meta-names-joel-kaplan-to-succeed-nick-clegg-as-policy-chief.html +[^11]: "Mark Zuckerberg says companies need more 'masculine energy,'" *Fortune,* January 13, 2025, on the Joe Rogan podcast remarks. https://fortune.com/2025/01/13/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-masculine-energy-meta/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michael Vassar.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michael Vassar.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5d856b1f --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michael Vassar.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "AI & Effective Altruism" +tags: + - Person + - Rationalism + - MIRI + - Vassarites + - Cult + - PsychologicalControl + - ArtificialIntelligence +summary: "Michael Vassar is an American businessman who served as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 2009 to 2011 and later led an informal circle, the Vassarites, that recruited from the rationalist movement and used confrontational psychological methods and psychedelics, and that is widely cited as the tendency from which the Zizian group splintered." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Michael Vassar is an American businessman and a central figure of the [[Rationalist Community]] who served as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]) from 2009 to 2011. After leaving the institute he built an informal circle, dubbed by others "the Vassarites," that recruited from the [[Berkeley]] rationalist and [[Effective Altruism]] social network and practiced an intensive, confrontational psychological method aimed at freeing members from what Vassar characterized as a corrupt and conformist society. The circle is widely identified as the tendency from which [[Jack LaSota]]'s [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group splintered.[^1][^2] + +### The Singularity Institute Presidency + +Vassar announced his presidency of the Singularity Institute in a February 16, 2009 blog post, leading the organization through the period when its public conference, the [[Singularity Summit]], was at its height and when [[Peter Thiel]] was its most prominent funder. He had previously served on the institute's board, and his tenure overlapped the New York editions of the summit and the buildup of the in-person Berkeley community. [[Luke Muehlhauser]] became executive director in November 2011 as Vassar moved out of day-to-day leadership.[^3][^6] + +In 2012 Vassar cofounded [[MetaMed Research]], a personalized medical-research startup, with the Estonian programmer [[Jaan Tallinn]] as chief technology officer and the rationalist writer [[Zvi Mowshowitz]] and the entrepreneur [[Nevin Freeman]] among the cofounders, and with a roughly 500,000 dollar seed investment from Thiel. Vassar served as chief science officer and pitched the company as an application of the community's rationality techniques to diagnosis and treatment, selling teams of researchers to wealthy patients dissatisfied with conventional care. MetaMed became defunct around 2015.[^6][^7] + +### The Vassarites and the Jailbreaking Method + +The circle that formed around Vassar after he left the institute held what observers described as a gnostic stance: that ordinary society is pervasively corrupt, conformist, and traumatizing, and that members needed to "jailbreak" themselves from it. The method involved long, destabilizing conversations intended to break down a person's existing beliefs and sense of self, sometimes accompanied by psychedelic drugs. Vassar recruited from the MIRI and [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR) network and told members that those organizations were themselves part of the corrupt order he opposed.[^1] + +Several members of the milieu suffered acute psychiatric crises that other community members connected, in contested first-person accounts, to Vassar's influence. A former MIRI researcher, [[Jessica Taylor]], was hospitalized for roughly three weeks in 2017 with delusions of being "intrinsically evil," an episode discussed at length in community writeups that linked the high-intensity culture and Vassar's conversations to the breakdowns; the causal attribution remains disputed within the community.[^1][^4] + +### The Zizian Splinter + +Vassar met with LaSota and other future Zizians in January 2019, and the Zizian formation is repeatedly described in the reporting and the community record as a splinter of the Vassarite tendency, sharing its premise that the rationalist establishment was corrupt and that radical psychological and moral self-transformation was required. The Zizian group went on to be tied to six killings across three states between 2022 and 2025.[^2][^5] + +The mechanism the community accounts describe is continuous between the two formations: the practice of inducing paranoia toward MIRI and CFAR, the use of psychedelics to break down a person's existing sense of self, and the discouraging of psychiatric treatment for the resulting crises, which were sometimes characterized as evidence of breaking free rather than as breakdowns. LaSota took the Vassarite gnostic frame further into an idiosyncratic theory of hemispheric "single-good" and "single-evil" brain hemispheres, veganism as a moral absolute, and a willingness to use violence, and the Zizians cut ties with the wider community after the 2019 CFAR reunion protest. Vassar has not been charged in connection with the Zizian killings, and the causal chain from his circle to LaSota's group is drawn by community participants and journalists rather than established in court.[^1][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account describing the Vassarite tendency, its recruitment from the MIRI and CFAR network, and the psychiatric crises. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe +[^2]: "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/ +[^3]: "MetaMed," and Vassar's tenure as president of the Singularity Institute, 2009 to 2011; cross-referenced against the MIRI organizational timeline at timelines.issarice.com. +[^4]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," reporting on the 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg +[^5]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^6]: "Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute," Timelines Wiki, on Vassar's February 16, 2009 announcement of his presidency, his departure to cofound MetaMed in 2012, and Muehlhauser's November 2011 appointment as executive director. https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute +[^7]: "If a doctor's opinion isn't enough, MetaMed will sell you a team of personal medical researchers," *MedCity News,* July 2013, and "MetaMed," on the 2012 founding, the Tallinn, Mowshowitz, and Freeman cofounders, the roughly 500,000 dollar Thiel seed investment, Vassar as chief science officer, and the company's closure around 2015. https://medcitynews.com/2013/07/if-a-doctors-opinion-isnt-enough-metamed-will-sell-you-a-team-of-personal-medical-researchers/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michelle Zajko.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michelle Zajko.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3112fc45 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michelle Zajko.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Extremism & Violent Networks" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Violence + - Firearms +alias: + - Michelle Jacqueline Zajko +summary: "Michelle Zajko is a member of the Zizian group whose parents were shot to death in their Pennsylvania home on New Year's Eve 2022, who federal prosecutors charged with illegally buying the firearms later used in the Vermont killing of a Border Patrol agent, and who has publicly denied killing her parents." +location: "Chester Heights, Pennsylvania; Coventry, Vermont" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Michelle Zajko is a member of the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group whose parents, [[Richard Zajko]] (72) and [[Rita Zajko]] (69), were found shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, [[Pennsylvania]], on the night of December 31, 2022. She was questioned and named a person of interest in their deaths but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Federal prosecutors separately charged her over the firearms tied to the January 2025 Zizian killing of a Border Patrol agent in [[Vermont]].[^1][^2] + +### The Firearms Charge + +Federal authorities in Vermont charged Zajko, a former resident of Coventry, with making false statements to buy firearms. Investigators alleged that in February 2024 she provided a false address to purchase three firearms from a Vermont gun store, and that one of those weapons was used in the January 20, 2025 shootout on Interstate 91 in which Agent [[David Maland]] and the group member [[Felix Bauckholt]] were killed. Authorities have said Zajko provided the gun used in the Vermont shooting.[^2][^3] + +Investigators also drew a forensic line back to her parents' deaths. Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard Zajko in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, with two 9mm shell casings left at the scene and no weapon recovered; a neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania authorities determined that the bullet recovered from Richard Zajko's body matched ammunition Michelle Zajko had purchased in Vermont, and she acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Prosecutors in the Vermont border case said she had been in frequent contact with [[Teresa Youngblut]] in the period around the shooting.[^4][^6] + +### Arrest and the Open Letter + +On February 16, 2025, Zajko was arrested in Allegany County, [[Maryland]], alongside [[Jack LaSota]] and [[Daniel Blank]] after a property owner near [[Frostburg]] reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; they were charged with trespassing, obstructing law enforcement, and illegal firearm possession, and all three were ordered held without bail on February 18. The arrest delivered LaSota, a fugitive who had staged her own death in 2022, into custody alongside Zajko in a single stop.[^4][^7] + +Through her attorney she released a twenty-page handwritten "Open Letter to the World," provided to the Associated Press, in which she wrote, "You, the public, are being lied to," and denied killing her parents, stating that "the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you've been reading about in the papers." She remained a person of interest in the Pennsylvania killings without being charged in them, while the federal firearms case proceeded separately in Vermont. By early 2026 she was among at least seven people associated with the group facing charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.[^5][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Michelle Zajko sought for questioning in connection with multiple slayings," *The Philadelphia Inquirer,* January 31, 2025. https://www.inquirer.com/crime/michelle-zajko-vermont-killings-rita-richard-20250131.html +[^2]: "Former Vermont resident faces federal firearm charge related to killing of border patrol agent," *VTDigger,* February 18, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/02/18/former-vermont-resident-faces-federal-firearm-charge-related-to-killing-of-border-patrol-agent/ +[^3]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^4]: "Member of Zizians, cultlike group of AI-obsessed vegans, says she didn't kill her parents," *NBC News,* 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/member-zizians-cultlike-group-ai-obsessed-vegans-says-didnt-kill-paren-rcna201537 +[^5]: "Daughter of Pennsylvania couple who died says in new 'open letter' she didn't kill her parents," CBS News Philadelphia, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/michelle-zajko-zizian-pennsylvania-murder/ +[^6]: "Woman charged in killing of Border Patrol agent was in contact with Pennsylvania homicide suspect: prosecutors," CBS News Philadelphia, 2025, on the contact between Zajko and Youngblut. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/teresa-youngblut-david-maland-pennsylvania-suspect/ +[^7]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the Frostburg arrest and the February 18 detention order. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^8]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Norbert Wiener.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Norbert Wiener.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5c611596 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Norbert Wiener.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +category: "Scientists & Researchers" +tags: + - Person + - NorbertWiener + - Cybernetics + - Mathematics + - Automation + - MIT +alias: + - Norbert Wiener +summary: "Norbert Wiener was the American mathematician who founded cybernetics, the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine, building on his wartime work on automatic gun-aiming, and who warned that the automation it enabled could dehumanize labor." +born: 1894-11-26 +died: 1964-03-18 +location: "Columbia, Missouri; Cambridge, Massachusetts" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 to March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher who founded [[Cybernetics|cybernetics]], the study of control and communication in living organisms and machines, which he named in his 1948 book of that title. A child prodigy who took a Harvard doctorate at eighteen, he spent his career at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], where he did foundational work in probability, harmonic analysis, and the mathematics of prediction, and where his World War II research on automatic anti-aircraft fire control led him to the feedback principle at the heart of cybernetics. He was also an early and insistent moral critic of his own field, warning that automatic machinery could throw people out of work and reduce human beings to servants of the machines they built.[^1][^2] + +### The Prodigy and the Mathematician + +Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the son of Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor of Slavic languages who subjected the boy to an intense and demanding home education. He entered Tufts College at eleven, graduated at fourteen, and took a doctorate from Harvard at eighteen in 1913 with a dissertation on mathematical logic, after which a traveling fellowship took him to Cambridge to study under [[Bertrand Russell]] and to Gottingen to work with [[David Hilbert]]. He joined the mathematics department at MIT in 1919 and remained there for the rest of his career, recounting his unusual upbringing in two memoirs, *Ex-Prodigy* (1953) and *I Am a Mathematician* (1956).[^1][^3] + +His pure mathematics was substantial and influential. In the 1920s he constructed a rigorous mathematical model of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles, now called the Wiener process and a foundation of modern probability theory and stochastic calculus, and he did major work in harmonic analysis and Tauberian theorems. During and after the war he developed the theory of optimal filtering of signals from noise, the Wiener filter, which along with related work by the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov became a standard tool in signal processing and control engineering.[^2][^3] + +### The Anti-Aircraft Predictor + +When the United States entered World War II, Wiener turned to the problem of aiming anti-aircraft guns at fast, evasive aircraft, work funded from 1940 through the National Defense Research Committee. The difficulty was that a shell took many seconds to reach altitude, so the gun had to be aimed not where the plane was but where it would be, which required predicting the future path of a pilot who was actively trying not to be predictable. With the engineer Julian Bigelow, Wiener treated the pilot-and-plane as a single system whose future position could be estimated statistically from its past track, and built an electromechanical predictor to compute the lead automatically.[^4][^5] + +The predictor was never deployed, but the conceptual yield was decisive. Wiener and Bigelow found that a system correcting its aim from feedback could, if the feedback were excessive, fall into wild oscillation resembling a human movement disorder, which prompted Wiener to consult the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth about feedback and purpose in the nervous system. Their 1943 paper "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," written with Rosenblueth and Bigelow, argued that purposeful behavior in animals and in machines alike could be understood as feedback-controlled action, collapsing the supposed distinction between the goal-seeking of organisms and of servomechanisms.[^4][^5] + +### Coining Cybernetics + +Wiener gathered these ideas into *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine* (1948), coining the term from the Greek kybernetes, meaning steersman or governor, the same root that gives "governor" in both the political and the mechanical sense. The book proposed that control, feedback, communication, and the statistical concept of information were a common language for phenomena in engineering, biology, and society, and despite its technical mathematics it became an unexpected popular success. The framework developed in close exchange with the interdisciplinary [[Macy Conferences]] on circular causal and feedback mechanisms, held in New York from 1946 to 1953, where Wiener, [[John von Neumann]], [[Claude Shannon]], the anthropologists [[Margaret Mead]] and [[Gregory Bateson]], and the neurophysiologist [[Warren McCulloch]] worked to extend the feedback idea across the sciences.[^2][^6] + +Cybernetics gave a generation of researchers a vocabulary of feedback loops, homeostasis, and information, and it shaped fields from control theory and computing to ecology, management, and the social sciences. Wiener himself drew a sharp line between his interest in the existing analogy between machines and nervous systems and any claim that machines would soon equal human beings; his concern was less with building artificial minds than with understanding control and communication as such, and with their human consequences.[^2][^6] + +### The Human Use of Human Beings + +In *The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society* (1950) Wiener translated the technical argument into a broad reflection on what automatic machinery would do to human society. He predicted that the automatic factory and the feedback-controlled machine would replace not only manual labor but routine clerical and decision-making work, and he warned that this "second industrial revolution" could produce unemployment and social dislocation on a scale that would make the Depression "seem a pleasant joke" if it were left to the unregulated market. He framed the danger in moral terms, arguing that to use a human being as a mere cog, valuing only the physical or routine mental work that a machine could also do, was to degrade and waste that human being.[^7][^8] + +Wiener pressed the point in practice as well as in print. In 1949 he wrote to [[Walter Reuther]], the head of the United Automobile Workers, to warn that automatic control of machinery was coming and to offer his help to organized labor in preparing for it, fearing that the technology would otherwise be used purely to cut labor costs. He returned to the relationship between cybernetics, creation, and responsibility in his last book, *God and Golem, Inc.* (1964), a meditation on machines that learn and reproduce, published shortly after his death and awarded the National Book Award.[^7][^9] + +### The Refusal of Secrecy + +After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wiener became one of the most outspoken scientists of his generation on the ethics of research. In January 1947 the *Atlantic Monthly* published his open letter "A Scientist Rebels," in which he refused a researcher's request for a copy of his wartime work because it might be applied to weapons, declaring that he would not "publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists" and that a scientist was not obliged to serve ends he found morally abhorrent. He withdrew from classified and military-funded research and urged colleagues to weigh the uses to which their work would be put.[^9][^10] + +Wiener died of a heart attack in Stockholm in March 1964 while traveling, having received the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon Johnson earlier that year. His insistence that the builders of automatic systems bear responsibility for their human effects, set against his own founding role in the science that made those systems possible, runs through the later literature on automation, computing, and technological risk.[^1][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Norbert Wiener," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the 1894 birth, the Tufts and Harvard education, the MIT career, the coinage of cybernetics, and the 1964 death. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norbert-Wiener +[^2]: Wiener, Norbert. *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.* MIT Press, 1948. +[^3]: Wiener, Norbert. *Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth* (1953) and *I Am a Mathematician* (1956), MIT Press, on his upbringing, the Brownian-motion and harmonic-analysis work, and the Wiener filter. +[^4]: Galison, Peter. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," *Critical Inquiry,* vol. 21, no. 1 (1994), on the anti-aircraft predictor, Julian Bigelow, and the origins of feedback thinking. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343893 +[^5]: Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," *Philosophy of Science,* vol. 10, no. 1 (1943), on feedback and purposeful behavior in animals and machines. +[^6]: "The Macy Conferences," American Society for Cybernetics, on the 1946 to 1953 meetings and the participation of Wiener, von Neumann, Shannon, Mead, Bateson, and McCulloch. https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm +[^7]: Wiener, Norbert. *The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.* Houghton Mifflin, 1950, on the second industrial revolution, automation and unemployment, and the degradation of human labor. +[^8]: "Norbert Wiener and the Counterculture," and contemporary accounts of *The Human Use of Human Beings,* on the "pleasant joke" warning about technological unemployment. +[^9]: Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. *Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics.* Basic Books, 2005, on the Reuther letter, *God and Golem, Inc.,* the National Book Award, the National Medal of Science, and the 1964 death. +[^10]: Wiener, Norbert. "A Scientist Rebels," *The Atlantic Monthly,* January 1947, declining to supply wartime research for possible weapons use. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1947/01/a-scientist-rebels/306533/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Peter Thiel.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Peter Thiel.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..92d1ea18 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Peter Thiel.md @@ -0,0 +1,135 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - PeterThiel + - Palantir + - PayPalMafia + - SiliconValley + - Neoreaction + - FoundersFund + - Dialog + - DarkEnlightenment + - Trump +alias: + - Peter Andreas Thiel +summary: "Peter Thiel is a German-born American billionaire investor who cofounded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, founded Founders Fund, cofounded the secret society Dialog in 2006, is the central figure of the PayPal Mafia, and is the most prominent financial patron of the neoreactionary political philosopher Curtis Yarvin." +born: 1967-10-11 +location: "Frankfurt, West Germany (born); San Francisco, California (base)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Peter Thiel (born October 11, 1967, in [[Frankfurt]], [[West Germany]]) is a German-born American billionaire investor and the central figure of the [[PayPal Mafia]], the informal network of founders and early executives of [[PayPal]] who went on to found or lead much of the subsequent generation of [[Silicon Valley]] companies. Thiel cofounded PayPal, founded the venture capital firm [[Founders Fund]], and cofounded and chairs the data-analytics and defense contractor [[Palantir Technologies]]. In 2006 he cofounded the secret society [[Dialog]] with [[Auren Hoffman]]. He is the most prominent documented financial patron of the neoreactionary philosopher [[Curtis Yarvin]], the founder of [[Neoreaction]] (NRx) and co-originator of the [[Dark Enlightenment]], and his political investments extended to funding the covert lawsuit that destroyed [[Gawker Media]] and bankrolling the U.S. Senate and subsequent vice-presidential campaigns of [[JD Vance]].[^1][^2][^3] + +Across these activities Thiel has built a coordinated program for the privatization and concentration of state-adjacent capacity: payments (PayPal), intelligence and law-enforcement data integration (Palantir Technologies), elite convening (Dialog), and the ideological framework that argues this concentration is both desirable and inevitable (the Yarvin patronage and the neoreactionary current). The political donations placed figures aligned with the thesis (Vance, [[Blake Masters]]) inside the U.S. government. The set of activities is mutually reinforcing rather than a portfolio of separate bets. + +### PayPal and the PayPal Mafia + +Thiel cofounded the online payments company Confinity in 1998, which merged with [[Elon Musk]]'s X.com in 2000 to form PayPal, and Thiel served as chief executive through the company's 2002 initial public offering and acquisition by [[eBay]] for 1.5 billion dollars. The exit dispersed a cohort of founders and early engineers, each capitalised at levels that let them found the subsequent generation of consumer-internet companies, and the cohort acquired the label PayPal Mafia as a recognizable social and commercial network.[^1][^4] + +The PayPal Mafia included [[Max Levchin]] (CTO, later [[Affirm]]), [[Reid Hoffman]] (executive vice president, later [[LinkedIn]]), [[David Sacks]] (COO, later [[Yammer]] and the Trump administration crypto role), [[Ken Howery]] (CFO, later Trump-era ambassador to [[Sweden]]), [[Luke Nosek]] (founding team, later Founders Fund partner), [[Roelof Botha]] (CFO, later [[Sequoia Capital]] partner), [[Keith Rabois]] (executive, later Founders Fund and OpenStore), [[Jeremy Stoppelman]] (later [[Yelp]]), and the three YouTube cofounders [[Chad Hurley]], [[Steve Chen]], and [[Jawed Karim]]. Six members of the network appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, per *WIRED*. The network functions as a recurring capital and endorsement channel: PayPal Mafia founders sit on each other's boards, invest in each other's subsequent companies, and convene, through Dialog, in the same off-the-record setting.[^1][^4] + +### Palantir Technologies + +In 2003 Thiel cofounded Palantir Technologies with [[Joe Lonsdale|Joseph Lonsdale]], [[Alex Karp]], [[Stephen Cohen]], and [[Nathan Gettings]], initially funded in part by an investment from the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] venture capital arm [[In-Q-Tel]]. Palantir Technologies built its business on data integration and analytics platforms for intelligence, defense, and law enforcement clients, and became a major contractor to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ([[ICE]]) for case management, to the Department of Defense, and to allied intelligence services. Thiel chairs the company.[^2][^3] + +The Palantir Technologies contracting model uses a single firm to supply data fusion across multiple federal agencies. Thiel has argued publicly that concentrated private technological capacity should replace decentralized government functions, and Palantir is the firm he built to apply that thesis. The company received early institutional backing from In-Q-Tel, took its direct listing on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in September 2020 under ticker PLTR, and supplies two principal products: Gotham for intelligence and defense users and Foundry for commercial enterprises. The early growth driver was post-[[September 11 attacks|9/11]] counterterrorism contracting, and the platform was used in the operation that located [[Osama bin Laden]] in 2011, according to company and press accounts.[^2][^3] + +### Founders Fund + +Thiel founded Founders Fund in 2005 with Howery and Nosek. The firm's portfolio includes early investments in Facebook (Thiel was the first outside investor, in 2004, with 500,000 dollars), [[SpaceX]], [[Airbnb]], [[Stripe]], and the defense contractor [[Anduril Industries]]. Founders Fund's investment thesis, articulated in Thiel's framing, targets companies pursuing monopoly positions in technologies the firm judges to be foundational, including defense, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.[^2] + +The thesis is set out in the 2014 book *Zero to One*, coauthored by Thiel and Masters, which argues that competition is for losers and that durable value comes from building monopolies around proprietary technology. The framework licenses the fund's preference for capital-intensive, defensibility-focused bets in domains (defense, frontier biotech, sovereign-grade infrastructure) that traditional venture capital had avoided. Founders Fund was the first institutional backer of Anduril Industries, the Palmer Luckey defense firm that operationalized the same thesis for the Pentagon market, and the firm's defense portfolio is the commercial counterpart to Thiel's argument that state capacity should be rebuilt by private contractors under private control.[^2] + +### Dialog + +In 2006 Thiel cofounded the invitation-only secret society Dialog with Hoffman, which convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. The organization operated without a public website and with a deliberately concealed membership until June 2026, when the hacktivist crimew published a membership directory embedded in the Dialog website's source code and a source separately provided *WIRED* with the 222-name registration list for the 2026 retreat. The 2026 registrants included Musk, Harris, Representative Himes, Senator Booker, Senator Cruz, Governor Polis, Levin of Stanford University, and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Grynkewich.[^1] + +Dialog's function in the Thiel network is convening: it places the commercial principals (the PayPal Mafia core), the ideological principals (the neoreactionary and adjacent intellectuals), and the government principals (sitting senators, the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, an active four-star NATO commander) in a single off-the-record room. The registration fee of more than 16,000 dollars, the no-press rule, and the matchmaking app together constitute the design of a private institution optimized for sustained, repeated, unrecorded contact across the three networks. A 2013 Dialog retreat invitation surfaced in the Department of Justice Epstein document release, forwarded to Epstein in November 2012, which establishes that Dialog's circulation list overlapped with the Epstein contact network in Thiel's orbit.[^1][^4] + +### René Girard and Mimetic Theory + +Thiel's intellectual framework derives from the French theorist [[Rene Girard|René Girard]], under whom he studied as a [[Stanford University]] undergraduate in the late 1980s and with whom he kept a lifelong association. Girard's theory of mimetic desire holds that people want things because others want them, that imitation breeds rivalry, and that archaic societies discharged the resulting violence onto scapegoats. Thiel adopted the framework directly: he credits it with his 2004 decision to make the first outside investment in [[Facebook]], which he read as a mimetic engine, and *Zero to One* applies the theory in arguing that competition is a destructive trap and that founders should escape rivalry by building monopolies.[^2][^15] + +Thiel funds Imitatio, a [[Thiel Foundation]] project he established with the theologian [[Robert Hamerton-Kelly]] and Girard to promote mimetic theory. The Girardian reading of crowds and scapegoating recurs across Thiel's public conduct, from his account of his 2007 outing by Gawker to the apocalyptic structure of the Antichrist lectures.[^14][^15] + +### The Curtis Yarvin Patronage and Neoreaction + +Thiel is the most prominent documented financial patron of Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name [[Moldbug]] and is the founder of the Neoreaction (NRx) movement and co-originator of the Dark Enlightenment ideological current. Yarvin's blog *Unqualified Reservations*, active from 2007, argued that liberal democracy is a failing state form and should be replaced by corporate, monarchical government organized under what he termed [[Neocameralism]]. A 2008 [[Cato Unbound]] essay by Thiel titled "The Education of a Libertarian" declared "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," a formulation closely tracking Yarvin's argument, and Thiel's funding of Yarvin is documented across multiple years.[^2][^3] + +The Yarvin current is intellectually adjacent to but distinct from the violent [[Accelerationism]] of the [[James Mason]] *[[Siege]]* tradition. Yarvin's program is procedural (the seizure and reorganization of state power by a sovereign executive) rather than collapse-and-reconstitution, though both currents draw on the same diagnosis of liberal democratic failure. The bridge figure is the philosopher [[Nick Land]], whose [[CCRU]]-era writings on right-accelerationism feed into the Dark Enlightenment and whose work Yarvin cites. Thiel's funding of Yarvin connects the PayPal Mafia commercial network to the Neoreaction intellectual network through a single patron. The procedural and the violent accelerationist variants share a diagnosis but diverge on method: Yarvin's program is capital-intensive and institutional; the [[Atomwaffen Division]] and [[The Base]] tradition is paramilitary and cell-based.[^3] + +### The Singularity Institute and AI-Risk Funding + +Thiel was the earliest prominent funder of the artificial-intelligence-risk movement that produced the Bay Area [[Rationalist Community]]. He began donating in 2005 to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the nonprofit founded by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] that was later renamed the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI), and in 2006 cofounded its conference, the [[Singularity Summit]], with Yudkowsky and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]]. His cumulative donations to the institute were later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars. The funding helped concentrate the rationalist and transhumanist scene in the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] during its formative decade, the same milieu from which the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and the [[Leverage Research]], [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]], and [[The Zizians|Zizian]] formations later emerged.[^13] + +By the mid-2010s Thiel said the researchers he had funded had drifted "from transhumanism to Luddite." In a private four-part lecture series on the [[Antichrist]] delivered in San Francisco in September and October 2025, recordings of which reached the *Washington Post*, he named Yudkowsky alongside the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] and the climate activist [[Greta Thunberg]] as "legionnaires of the Antichrist," technology-stopping figures he said had become "deranged." In the September 15 lecture he said, "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or Eliezer."[^14] + +### The Gawker Litigation + +Between 2007 and 2016 Thiel covertly funded the invasion-of-privacy lawsuit brought by the professional wrestler [[Hulk Hogan]] (Terry Bollea) against Gawker Media over the publication of a sex tape. Thiel retained the lawyer Charles Hard and covered approximately ten million dollars in legal costs, removing the financial constraints that would normally have driven the parties to settle. The resulting 140 million dollar Florida jury verdict in [[Bollea v. Gawker]] drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy and ended the outlet in 2016.[^1][^2] + +Thiel acknowledged the funding in a *Forbes* interview, framing it as retaliation for Gawker's 2007 article outing him as gay. The arrangement's legal structure was distinctive: a third-party billionaire paying the plaintiff's costs through a dedicated litigation vehicle, with no settlement incentive on the plaintiff's side because the plaintiff's costs were covered externally. *WIRED* identified the outcome as a contributing factor to Dialog's low public profile in subsequent years.[^1] + +### Political Investments: Vance, Masters, and Trump + +Thiel's political activity moved from libertarian advocacy to direct electoral investment in the 2020s. He was the largest single donor to the 2022 U.S. Senate campaign of JD Vance in [[Ohio]], contributing approximately fifteen million dollars through a super PAC, and to the concurrent Senate campaign of Masters in [[Arizona]], who had served as president of [[Thiel Capital]] and as coauthor with Thiel of *Zero to One*. Vance won and, in 2024, was elected Vice President of the United States on the Republican ticket with [[Donald Trump]].[^2] + +Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention endorsing Trump and was a significant contributor to his 2016 and 2024 campaigns. The Vance outcome compressed an unusually short cycle from investment to return: a single donor's fifteen million dollars in primary-cycle super PAC spending produced a sitting U.S. senator who became vice president within three years. The Masters campaign lost. Both candidates had been backed by Thiel and had worked under him (Masters as Thiel Capital president and *Zero to One* coauthor; Vance as a Thiel-funded political entrant).[^2] + +### The 2016 Transition and the NSC Placements + +Thiel joined the Trump transition team's executive committee in November 2016 and used the position to place associates into national-security and technology roles. [[Kevin Harrington|Kevin Harrington]], managing director of [[Thiel Macro|Thiel Macro LLC]] and a longtime Thiel associate, was appointed Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the [[National Security Council|National Security Council]] and subsequently elevated to Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Planning. *Just Security* described Harrington as an architect of the Trump NSC structure. [[Justin Mikolay|Justin Mikolay]], a former Palantir official, took a senior government role, and a Thiel aide was appointed White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer.[^12] + +Thiel himself declined a formal administration position, telling *Politico* in January 2017 that he wanted to "stay involved in Silicon Valley and help Mr. Trump as I can without a full-time position." The Harrington NSC placement placed a Thiel-employee inside the strategic-planning apparatus of the national-security council, at the level where intelligence priorities, defense procurement, and foreign-policy framing are coordinated. The placement ran alongside the Palantir government-contracting expansion, the Founders Fund defense-portfolio buildout, and the Dialog convening-network operation.[^12] + +### The Sovereign Individual and the Ideological Frame + +Thiel has repeatedly cited the 1997 book *The Sovereign Individual* by [[James Dale Davidson]] and [[William Rees-Mogg|Lord William Rees-Mogg]] as prophetic. The book argued that digital encryption and electronic commerce would erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction. The framework connects Thiel's commercial investments (cryptocurrency, offshore structures, the [[Seasteading Institute]], the Founders Fund thesis) to the Neoreaction argument that state capacity should be privatized.[^2] + +The Davidson-Rees-Mogg thesis is that the sovereign individual is the natural successor to the nation-state as the relevant unit of political and economic agency, and that the firms building the infrastructure for that transition (payments, encryption, identity, data fusion, private defense) are positioned to become the institutional substrate of the post-state order. Thiel has endorsed the book repeatedly in public, including in *Zero to One* and in interviews, and the commercial portfolio tracks the infrastructure categories the book identifies.[^2] + +### Epstein Contacts + +The unsealed [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]] document releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act document a Thiel-Epstein relationship running from 2011 through 2019, eight years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement. The primary-document index (EFTA01738574) records a February 6, 2016 email in which Epstein wrote that Thiel "LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea.. he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far." An August 2015 dinner that Reid Hoffman hosted in [[Palo Alto]] (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) placed Thiel at the same table as [[Mark Zuckerberg]], Elon Musk, [[Joi Ito]] of the [[MIT Media Lab]], and Epstein. *Jacobin* (April 2026) reported that hundreds of emails document Epstein's encouragement of Thiel's political trajectory, including a February 2013 audio recording of Epstein advising Thiel.[^1][^5][^6] + +A 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Epstein in November 2012 surfaced in the Department of Justice [[Epstein Files|Epstein document release]] (document D-23831), placing Epstein on the Dialog circulation list. The [[New York Times]] reported in May 2023 that Thiel met with Epstein multiple times in 2014. The Carstensen EFTA index documents additional exchanges including a 2014 meeting at the Epstein townhouse attended by CIA director [[William Burns|William J. Burns]] and an occasion on which Thiel lunched with Russian UN ambassador [[Vitaly Churkin]]. Thiel is one of a number of Silicon Valley and finance figures whose post-2008 contacts with Epstein have been documented through the releases.[^1][^5][^6][^7] + +### The FBI Confidential Human Source Relationship + +[[Business Insider]] reported in October 2023 that Thiel began providing information to the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] as a confidential human source (CHS) in summer 2021, with the Los Angeles-based counterintelligence agent [[Jonathan Buma]] as his handler. The CHS relationship placed Thiel in the formal FBI source program while he simultaneously chaired Palantir Technologies (a major CIA and FBI contractor), cofounded the Dialog convening network, funded the JD Vance and Blake Masters Senate campaigns, and maintained the documented Epstein relationship that ran through 2019. A House Judiciary Committee document submitted January 22, 2026 references Thiel's CHS role in the congressional record.[^8] + +Buma was arrested at [[John F. Kennedy International Airport|JFK Airport]] on March 17, 2025 while attempting to board an international flight, charged with unlawfully disclosing confidential information. [[CBS News]] reported that FBI investigators assessed Buma may have compromised as many as 130 FBI files. Buma publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias, and claimed in May 2025 (per [[The Guardian]]) that "intense" Russian-intelligence efforts had targeted Elon Musk.[^8][^9] + +### The Clearview AI Seed Investment + +Thiel was the first investor in [[Clearview AI]], the facial-recognition firm founded by [[Hoan Ton-That]] and [[Richard Schwartz]], providing seed funding before the company was even named (the [[Smart Checker]] period). [[NPR]] confirmed in 2023 that Thiel was Clearview's first investor. The seed investment was made directly by Thiel rather than through Founders Fund, placing Clearview in the same Thiel-seed-investment lineage as Palantir.[^10] + +The *New York Times* reported in March 2021 that [[Charles C. Johnson|Charles Johnson]], the far-right provocateur and self-described federal informant, played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel in the Clearview founding. Johnson announced in 2017 that he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads," which *Byline Supplement* reported as part of the Clearview prehistory. Johnson subsequently claimed cofounder status and sued Clearview for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025.[^10] + +Johnson disclosed Thiel's FBI CHS status, per the Business Insider reporting of October 2023. The Johnson-Thiel relationship extends beyond Clearview: the *Business Insider* piece described Johnson as "a tech investor and far-right agitator with long-standing ties to both Thiel and to the network." The [[Federal Trade Commission]] issued a consent order against Clearview in March 2022 barring the company from selling its database to private entities, following the documented deployment of the product by law enforcement, government clients, and private actors.[^10] + +### New Zealand Citizenship + +Thiel was granted [[New Zealand]] citizenship on August 4, 2011 under an "exceptional circumstances" provision that waived the standard 1,350-day residency requirement. Thiel had visited New Zealand four times before the grant and had never resided there. The *Guardian*, *New York Times*, and *Washington Post* reported in February 2017 that internal Department of Internal Affairs officials granted the waiver after Thiel made approximately ten million dollars in New Zealand investments (including stakes in [[Xero]]) and a one million dollar donation to [[Christchurch]] earthquake relief. Thiel described New Zealand as "the future" in his citizenship application.[^11] + +The citizenship was not publicly disclosed for nearly six years. The February 2017 disclosure prompted criticism of the New Zealand government's use of the exceptional-circumstances provision for a non-resident billionaire. Thiel also acquired a 193-hectare estate near [[Lake Wanaka]] in the South Island, part of a documented pattern of Silicon Valley billionaire property acquisition in New Zealand. The New Zealand government subsequently tightened the investor-visa provisions.[^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. +[^3]: Yarvin, Curtis (Moldbug). "Unqualified Reservations" (blog), 2007 onward. See also Thiel, Peter. "The Education of a Libertarian." *Cato Unbound,* 2009. https://www.cato.org/cato-unbound/education-libertarian/ +[^4]: U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein document release. 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein, November 2012. Document D-23831. https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831 +[^5]: "Peter Thiel Is Latest Billionaire Said to Have Met With Jeffrey Epstein." *New York Times,* May 18, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/jeffrey-epstein-peter-thiel.html +[^6]: "Jeffrey Epstein Encouraged Peter Thiel's Political Journey." *Jacobin,* April 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/04/epstein-thiel-tech-finance-trump ; "What Peter Thiel Saw in Jeffrey Epstein." *The Nation,* 2026. https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=586795 +[^7]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, "Peter Thiel," cross-referencing the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) document releases, including EFTA01738574 (Feb 6, 2016 "secret society" email), EFTA00344556 and EFTA00344564 (2015 dinner guest list), and the Thiel-Churkin lunch record. https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^8]: "Exclusive: Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Was an FBI Informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10 ; U.S. Congress, House Judiciary Committee, document referencing Thiel's CHS role, January 22, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118881/documents/HHRG-119-JU00-20260122-SD011-U11.pdf +[^9]: "Former FBI Special Agent Arrested for Disclosure of Confidential Information." *DOJ Office of Inspector General,* 2025. https://oig.justice.gov/news/press-release/former-fbi-special-agent-arrested-disclosure-confidential-information ; "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia +[^10]: "What We Learned About Clearview AI's Hidden 'Co-Founder.'" *New York Times,* March 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/technology/clearview-facial-recognition-ai.html ; "Business Partner Sues Chuck Johnson for Falsely Presenting as Intelligence Agent." *Semafor,* October 16, 2024. https://www.semafor.com/article/10/16/2024/business-partner-sues-chuck-johnson-for-falsely-presenting-as-intelligence-agent +[^11]: "Documents reveal how Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship." *The Guardian,* February 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/01/documents-reveal-how-peter-thiel-was-granted-new-zealand-citizenship ; "New Zealand Is 'the Future,' Peter Thiel Said in His Push for Citizenship." *New York Times,* February 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/business/peter-thiel-new-zealand-citizenship.html +[^12]: "Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel's Influence is Shaping the National Security Council." *Just Security.* https://www.justsecurity.org/37466/disrupting-white-house-peter-thiels-influence-shaping-national-security-council/ ; "Peter Thiel: I won't take a job with Trump's administration." *Politico,* January 2017. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/peter-thiel-no-job-trump-administration-233523 ; "Inside Trump's shadow national security council." *Washington Post,* January 19, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/19/inside-trumps-shadow-national-security-council/ +[^13]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding the Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit; cumulative donations cross-referenced against the MIRI donation timeline at timelines.issarice.com. +[^14]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures.'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ ; "Peter Thiel Thinks the Antichrist Is 'Someone Like' This AI Doomer That He Funded." *Gizmodo,* October 2025. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-thinks-the-antichrist-is-someone-like-this-ai-doomer-that-he-funded-2000671027 +[^15]: "René Girard," *Encyclopædia Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Girard ; "Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel's French Connection," *Cyborgology,* August 13, 2016. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/ ; Imitatio, "What We Do." http://www.imitatio.org/about-imitatio diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Phil Zimmermann.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Phil Zimmermann.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ef69d57d --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Phil Zimmermann.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "Technologists" +tags: + - Person + - PhilZimmermann + - Cryptography + - PGP + - CryptoWars + - Privacy + - Cypherpunks +alias: + - Philip R. Zimmermann + - Phil Zimmermann +summary: "Phil Zimmermann is the programmer and anti-nuclear activist who wrote Pretty Good Privacy and released it for free in 1991, became the target of a three-year US criminal investigation that treated strong encryption as an exported munition, and went on to build the encrypted-voice tools Zfone and Silent Circle." +born: 1954-02-12 +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Philip R. Zimmermann (born February 12, 1954, in Camden, New Jersey) is an American software engineer and privacy activist who wrote [[Pretty Good Privacy]] and published it for free on the internet in 1991. PGP's spread beyond the United States made him the subject of a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had illegally exported a munition, an inquiry the government closed without charges in 1996. He later founded PGP Inc., worked on encrypted internet telephony with the ZRTP protocol and the Zfone software, and cofounded the secure-communications company Silent Circle. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.[^1][^2] + +### Background and the Release of PGP + +Zimmermann took a bachelor's degree in computer science from Florida Atlantic University in 1978 and worked for two decades as a software engineer in cryptography, data security, and embedded systems. His interest in the politics of cryptography grew out of his earlier involvement in the anti-nuclear movement and military-policy activism of the late Cold War, work in which he came to see communications privacy as a civil-liberties question rather than a purely technical one. He has said he built PGP as a human-rights tool, intended to give ordinary people and political dissidents access to encryption strong enough to resist a government.[^1][^3] + +He wrote that he was prompted to release the software by Senate Bill 266 of 1991, an anti-crime measure carrying a provision that would have pressed makers of secure communications equipment to build in government access. Zimmermann published PGP electronically without charge in June 1991, and within hours it spread across the internet and out of the country. He later summarized his motive in the essay "Why I Wrote PGP," arguing that "the only way to hold the line on privacy in the information age is strong cryptography," and in the slogan "If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy." The technical design of the software is treated on the Pretty Good Privacy page.[^3][^4] + +### The Criminal Investigation + +Because PGP traveled overseas almost immediately, it fell under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which classified strong cryptographic software as a munition that could not be exported without a license. The United States Customs Service opened a criminal investigation in 1993, run out of the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, into whether Zimmermann had violated the export controls when PGP appeared abroad. The case made him the most prominent individual target of what became known as the crypto wars, and for three years he faced the possibility of indictment for exporting a weapon.[^1][^2] + +Zimmermann and his supporters answered with a First Amendment argument that source code is constitutionally protected speech. In 1995 the MIT Press published the complete PGP source code as a printed book set in an optical-character-recognition font, so that it could be exported legally as a book, scanned abroad, and recompiled, a maneuver designed to test whether the government would treat the printed word as a munition. The United States Attorney's office declined to prosecute and the investigation closed in January 1996. Zimmermann received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design in 1995, and the Louis Brandeis Award from Privacy International in 1999.[^5][^2] + +### PGP Inc. and the Commercial Years + +After the case closed, Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. in 1996 to develop and sell the software commercially. The company was acquired by Network Associates in December 1997, where Zimmermann stayed on as a Senior Fellow for about three years. He hired [[Hal Finney]], who had been a central volunteer contributor to PGP 2.0 since 1991, as an employee once the investigation ended. When Network Associates sold the product line, a new PGP Corporation acquired it in 2002 and Zimmermann served as a special adviser; Symantec bought PGP Corporation in 2010.[^2][^6] + +During these years Zimmermann also advised privacy-oriented services built on his software, including the encrypted-webmail provider Hushmail. The open OpenPGP standard and the free GNU Privacy Guard reimplementation carried the design well beyond any single corporate owner, so that the message format Zimmermann had defined remained in wide use regardless of who held the commercial product.[^6][^7] + +### Encrypted Voice, Zfone, and Silent Circle + +Zimmermann turned in the 2000s to securing internet telephony. He designed ZRTP, a protocol that lets two parties on a voice-over-IP call negotiate an encryption key directly between their devices for each conversation, without a central server holding the keys, and built the Zfone software around it beginning in 2006 to encrypt VoIP calls. ZRTP uses a short authentication string the two callers read aloud to detect a man-in-the-middle interceptor.[^6][^8] + +In 2012 Zimmermann cofounded Silent Circle with the former Navy SEAL Mike Janke and the cryptographer Jon Callas to sell encrypted voice, video, text, and email to businesses and individuals. The company later moved its operations to Switzerland and shut down its Silent Mail email service in 2013 rather than comply with anticipated government demands for access, a decision that followed the closure of the encrypted-email provider Lavabit during the Edward Snowden disclosures. Silent Circle went on to develop the privacy-focused Blackphone handset.[^8][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Official Biography: Philip Zimmermann," Internet Hall of Fame, on the Florida Atlantic University degree in 1978, the military-policy background, the 1991 free release, the three-year investigation closed in 1996, PGP Inc., Network Associates, PGP Corporation, Symantec, Zfone, and the EFF Pioneer, Chrysler, and Brandeis awards. https://www.internethalloffame.org/official-biography-philip-zimmermann/ +[^2]: "Phil Zimmermann: PGP, the Crypto Wars, and the Right to Encrypted Communication," *Immunity Networks,* on the 1991 release, the ITAR investigation run from the Northern District of California, and the 1996 resolution. https://blog.immunitynetworks.com/phil-zimmermann-pgp-encryption-privacy-crypto-wars/ +[^3]: Zimmermann, Philip. "Why I Wrote PGP," on Senate Bill 266, the human-rights motivation, "the only way to hold the line on privacy in the information age is strong cryptography," and "if privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy." https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html +[^4]: Levy, Steven. *Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.* Viking, 2001, on Zimmermann, the 1991 release, and the crypto wars. +[^5]: Zimmermann, Philip R. *PGP: Source Code and Internals.* MIT Press, 1995, the printed PGP source code published to test the export rules. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm +[^6]: "Philip Zimmerman," *Computer Hope,* on Florida Atlantic University, PGP Inc., the Network Associates acquisition in December 1997, Hushmail, ZRTP and Zfone, and Silent Circle. https://www.computerhope.com/people/philip_zimmerman.htm +[^7]: "Hal Finney, cryptographer and bitcoin pioneer, dies," *The Boston Globe,* August 31, 2014, on Finney's PGP 2.0 contributions from 1991 and his hiring by Zimmermann when the investigation closed. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2014/08/31/hal-finney-cryptographer-and-bitcoin-pioneer-dies/7aFf8qJ1ixkF98m7QU76RP/story.html +[^8]: "Phil Zimmermann Returns With Silent Circle Voice and Data Privacy," *Threatpost,* June 15, 2012, on ZRTP, Zfone, and the 2012 founding of Silent Circle with Mike Janke and Jon Callas. https://threatpost.com/phil-zimmermann-returns-silent-circle-voice-and-data-privacy-061512/76698/ +[^9]: "PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder Phil Zimmermann on the surveillance society," *Communications of the ACM,* on Silent Circle, the Swiss move, and the shutdown of Silent Mail. https://cacmb4.acm.org/opinion/interviews/166827-pgp-inventor-and-silent-circle-co-founder-phil-zimmermann-on-the-surveillance-society/fulltext diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Teresa Youngblut.md b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Teresa Youngblut.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4c5ad9d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Teresa Youngblut.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +category: "Extremism & Violent Networks" +tags: + - Person + - Zizians + - Violence + - DeathPenalty + - Rationalism +summary: "Teresa Youngblut is a member of the Zizian group charged in federal court with the January 2025 murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland during a Vermont traffic stop, in a case in which the Department of Justice has filed notice that it will seek the death penalty." +location: "Washington (state)" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Teresa Youngblut is a member of the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group who was charged in federal court with the January 20, 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]] during a traffic stop in [[Coventry]], [[Vermont]]. The case became the first in which the Department of Justice under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration filed notice that it would seek the death penalty.[^1][^2] + +### Disappearance Into the Group + +Youngblut, originally from [[Washington (state)|Washington state]], was reported missing by her parents in the [[Seattle]] area after she sent her mother emails saying she had moved in with a friend and changed her phone number, severing contact with her family. She had been drawn into the network of mostly young, highly educated transgender members around [[Jack LaSota]] preoccupied with the dangers of artificial intelligence.[^3] + +The missing-person report was filed in May 2024 after the email and phone-number change. Youngblut had attended Lakeside School, the private Seattle academy where [[Maximilian Snyder]] was also a student, one of the personal ties that later linked her to the California branch of the group. In November 2024 she and Snyder applied for a marriage license in Washington, and around the same time she began renting a place in [[North Carolina]] near [[Felix Bauckholt]], who had taken a duplex in Chapel Hill in mid-2023; the relocation moved her into the cluster of members on the East Coast in the months before the Vermont shooting.[^4][^5][^6] + +### The Vermont Shooting and Prosecution + +On January 20, 2025, Youngblut was driving on Interstate 91 near the Canadian border with Felix Bauckholt when Border Patrol agents stopped the vehicle. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut got out and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon; Bauckholt and Agent Maland were killed and Youngblut was wounded. The stop was not random: a Lyndonville hotel employee had reported the pair around January 14 for checking in wearing all-black tactical clothing and a holstered firearm, prompting periodic surveillance, and a search of the vehicle yielded multiple firearms, hollow-point ammunition, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, handheld radios, and about a dozen electronic devices, some wrapped in aluminum foil.[^1][^5][^7] + +A superseding federal indictment returned in August 2025 charged Youngblut with murdering Maland and assaulting two other agents with a deadly weapon, alleging for the first time that she fired the fatal shot. The Department of Justice filed notice in August 2025 that it would seek the death penalty if she were convicted; Youngblut pleaded not guilty in September 2025. Although Vermont abolished capital punishment and has not executed anyone since 1954, the federal charges keep the death penalty available, and the proceedings continued into 2026 amid motions to delay the trial. Prosecutors said Youngblut had been in frequent contact with [[Michelle Zajko]], the person of interest in the Pennsylvania killing of her parents, and that the firearms she and Bauckholt carried had been purchased by Zajko; Youngblut was also in contact with Snyder, who was charged with murder in California three days before the Vermont stop.[^1][^2][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Prosecutors file notice they will seek the death penalty against Teresa Youngblut in border agent killing," *VTDigger,* August 14, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/08/14/grand-jury-returns-new-indictment-against-teresa-youngblut-for-allegedly-killing-border-agent/ +[^2]: "Prosecutors seek death penalty against Zizians member charged with murdering Vermont border agent," Associated Press via CBS News, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-seek-death-penalty-fatal-shooting-border-patrol-agent/ +[^3]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^4]: "Defendant linked to 'Zizians' pleads not guilty to capital murder," *Open Vallejo,* March 26, 2025, on the Lakeside School connection between Youngblut and Snyder. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/26/defendant-linked-to-zizians-pleads-not-guilty-to-capital-murder/ +[^5]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the May 2024 missing-person report, the November 2024 marriage-license application, and the North Carolina move. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^6]: "Suspects in killings of Vermont border patrol agent and California man connected by marriage license, extreme ideology," *VTDigger,* January 27, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/01/27/suspects-in-killings-of-vermont-border-patrol-agent-and-california-man-connected-by-marriage-license-extreme-ideology/ +[^7]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville hotel, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/ +[^8]: "Woman charged in killing of Border Patrol agent was in contact with Pennsylvania homicide suspect: prosecutors," CBS News Philadelphia, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/teresa-youngblut-david-maland-pennsylvania-suspect/ diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - AI & Effective Altruism.md b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - AI & Effective Altruism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b4227949 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - AI & Effective Altruism.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +tags: + - MOC + - META +--- +# AI & Effective Altruism + +Figures of the effective-altruism, rationalist, longtermist, and AI-safety movements and the artificial-intelligence labs and funders that grew out of them. + +```dataview +TABLE WITHOUT ID + file.link AS Name, + summary AS Description +FROM "10 - PEOPLE" +WHERE category = "AI & Effective Altruism" +SORT file.name ASC +``` diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - New Right.md b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - New Right.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b98f3b47 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - New Right.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +tags: + - MOC + - META +--- +# New Right + +Figures of the new right, neoreaction, accelerationism, and the dissident and race-realist intellectual milieu connected to the Thiel network. + +```dataview +TABLE WITHOUT ID + file.link AS Name, + summary AS Description +FROM "10 - PEOPLE" +WHERE category = "New Right" +SORT file.name ASC +``` diff --git a/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - Technologists.md b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - Technologists.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..802251a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/10 - PEOPLE/DATAVIEW - MOC - Technologists.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +tags: + - MOC + - META +--- +# Technologists + +Technology founders, executives, investors, and engineers in the Silicon Valley, Thiel-network, and AI-lab orbit documented in this vault. + +```dataview +TABLE WITHOUT ID + file.link AS Name, + summary AS Description +FROM "10 - PEOPLE" +WHERE category = "Technologists" +SORT file.name ASC +``` diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anduril Industries.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anduril Industries.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d5045f61 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anduril Industries.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Anduril + - DefenseContractor + - PalmerLuckey + - FoundersFund + - PeterThiel + - Pentagon + - Lattice + - AutonomousSystems +alias: + - Anduril Industries Inc. +summary: "Anduril Industries is a defense-technology contractor founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and Palantir Technologies alumni Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, backed by Founders Fund, that builds the Lattice autonomous-systems platform and autonomous hardware for the Pentagon and allied militaries, and was valued at 30.5 billion dollars in its 2025 Series G round." +location: "Costa Mesa, California (headquarters)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Anduril Industries is an American defense-technology contractor founded in 2017 by [[Palmer Luckey]] and a group of [[Palantir Technologies]] alumni including [[Brian Schimpf]], [[Trae Stephens]], [[Matt Grimm]], and [[Joe Chen]]. The company builds the [[Lattice (software platform)|Lattice]] software platform for fusing sensor data from autonomous systems into a single operating picture, and a range of autonomous hardware including the [[Ghost (drone)|Ghost]] and [[Altius (drone)|Altius]] unmanned aerial systems, the [[Fury (drone)|Fury]] autonomous fighter, the [[Dive-LD]] autonomous undersea vehicle, and the [[Sentry Tower]] ground-surveillance system. The company was valued at 30.5 billion dollars in a Series G funding round led by [[Founders Fund]] in 2025.[^1][^2] + +### The Palmer Luckey Founding and the Facebook Ouster + +Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 after his ouster from [[Facebook]], where he had been a cofounder of [[Oculus VR|Oculus]] following Facebook's 2014 acquisition of the virtual-reality company for approximately two billion dollars. The *Wall Street Journal* reported in 2018 that Luckey had been fired from Facebook in March 2017 over his political activity, specifically an approximately 10,000 dollar donation to the pro-[[Donald Trump|Trump]] organization [[Nimble America]] during the 2016 election and alleged ties to provocative social-media posts under a pseudonym. Luckey confirmed the firing in a 2019 CNBC interview, stating he had been terminated "for no reason at all" beyond the political donation.[^3][^4] + +The Anduril founding was the second act that followed the firing. Luckey's departure from the consumer-internet industry, on a political-donation controversy, coincided with his pivot to defense technology. The new company drew its technical leadership from the Palantir Technologies alumni network: Schimpf had been a Palantir engineering director, Stephens was a Founders Fund partner who had also worked at Palantir, and Grimm and Chen were Palantir alumni. The Palantir lineage supplied the data-fusion and government-contracting expertise that Luckey's hardware focus required.[^1][^5] + +### Founders Fund and the Investment Structure + +Founders Fund, the [[Peter Thiel]] venture firm, led Anduril's early funding rounds and remains its lead investor. Stephens is simultaneously a Founders Fund partner and Anduril's executive chairman, which means the lead investor and the company's board leadership are held by the same individual. Founders Fund led Anduril's Series G round in 2025, raising 2.5 billion dollars at a 30.5 billion dollar valuation, with a reported one billion dollars of the round coming from Founders Fund itself.[^2][^6] + +The Anduril-Founders Fund relationship applies the Thiel-network thesis that the Pentagon should procure from Silicon Valley-style commercial vendors rather than from the traditional defense primes ([[Lockheed Martin]], [[Raytheon]], [[Northrop Grumman]], [[Boeing]]). The investment thesis holds that the traditional primes have captured procurement through cost-plus contracting and slow development cycles, and that software-first commercial vendors can deliver autonomous systems at lower cost and faster iteration. The 30.5 billion dollar valuation makes Anduril the highest-valued private defense-technology company.[^2] + +### The Lattice Platform and the Product Line + +The Lattice software platform is built to fuse data from the company's own hardware and from third-party sensors into a single operational picture that a small number of operators can use to direct autonomous systems. The architecture mirrors the Palantir Gotham ontology approach (a common object model that maps disparate source data into a unified queryable structure) applied to the sensor-to-shooter problem rather than to the intelligence-analysis problem. The hardware line is built around the platform: the Ghost and Altius unmanned aerial systems, the Fury autonomous fighter, the Dive-LD undersea vehicle, and the Sentry Tower ground-surveillance system all feed into Lattice.[^1] + +Traditional defense procurement separates the platform (the aircraft, the vehicle, the sensor) from the software that operates it, with the Pentagon buying each from different vendors on separate contracts. Anduril bundles the hardware, the software, and the data fusion into a single vendor, which lets the company iterate the whole stack on commercial rather than defense-cycle timelines. The Replicator initiative, the Pentagon program to field thousands of low-cost autonomous systems, has been the principal public instance of this procurement model applied to Anduril hardware.[^1][^7] + +### Pentagon and Allied Contracts + +Anduril's public contract record includes the [[Special Operations Command]] contracts for Ghost drones, the [[Marine Corps]] and [[United Kingdom|UK]] [[Ministry of Defence]] contracts for Altius loitering munitions, and the participation in the Replicator initiative. The [[Ukraine]] war has been the largest operational test of the underlying thesis: Anduril and competitor autonomous systems have been used extensively by Ukrainian forces against Russian targets, and the company has publicly supplied systems to Ukraine outside the formal U.S. foreign-military-sales process.[^1][^7] + +The Ukraine deployment fed back into the product development cycle at a pace the traditional defense-contracting model does not permit. Anduril has cited the operational data from the conflict in its pitch for the Replicator and successor programs, and the use of Anduril hardware in the conflict is part of the public record of the defense-tech cluster's emergence as a procurement category distinct from the traditional primes.[^7] + +### Customs and Border Protection and the Sentry Tower Program + +[[U.S. Customs and Border Protection|CBP]] has deployed over 350 Sentry Towers along the U.S. southern border, covering approximately 30 percent of the southwest land border. The towers are self-powered, autonomous surveillance structures equipped with optical, thermal, and radar sensors integrated through the Lattice platform, autonomously detecting, classifying, and tracking objects of interest. CBP expanded the program under a 363 million dollar contract for 200 additional Extended Range Sentry Towers (XRST), 80-foot expeditionary structures with extended sensor range. The [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]] reported in April 2026 on opposition from a 62,000-resident California coastal community where an Anduril tower was slated for installation.[^8] + +The Sentry Tower program is the physical-surveillance layer of the border-enforcement pipeline that the Thiel-network firms supply. Palantir Technologies provides the back-end data integration, case management, and neighborhood-targeting through FALCON, ICM, ImmigrationOS, and the ELITE app. [[Clearview AI]] provides the facial-recognition identification from the surveillance imagery. The documented combination of Anduril (detection), Palantir (case management), and Clearview (facial identification) runs across the enforcement pipeline from border crossing through detention and deportation.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Anduril's product line, contract record, and operational deployments, see the company's own published materials at anduril.com and contemporaneous defense-trade press including *Defense News* and *Breaking Defense.* +[^2]: "Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund." *NBC New York* (via Bloomberg), 2025. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/anduril-raises-funding-at-30-5-billion-valuation-in-round-led-by-founders-fund-chairman-says/6291304/ +[^3]: "Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do With Trump." *Wall Street Journal,* November 11, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump-1541965245 +[^4]: "Oculus founder: 'I got fired' from Facebook." *CNBC,* May 22, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/oculus-co-founder-i-got-fired-from-facebook-for-no-reason-at-all.html +[^5]: Founders Fund. "Anduril" company page. https://foundersfund.com/company/anduril/ +[^6]: "Trae Stephens." *Forbes.* https://www.forbes.com/profile/trae-stephens/ +[^7]: For the Replicator initiative, Ukraine deployments, and the Pentagon autonomous-systems procurement record, see Department of Defense announcements and contemporaneous reporting in *Defense One* and *Politico*. +[^8]: "Anduril Wins $363M CBP Contract for XR Sentry Towers." *Tectonic Defense.* https://www.tectonic-defense.com/anduril-wins-363m-cbp-contract-for-xr-sentry-towers/ ; "Anduril Surveillance Towers." *U.S. Customs and Border Protection.* https://www.cbp.gov/document/foia-record/anduril-surveillance-towers ; "California Coastal Community Must Reject CBP's AI-Powered Surveillance Tower." *EFF,* April 2026. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/california-coastal-community-must-reject-cbps-ai-powered-surveillance-tower diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anonymous (collective).md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anonymous (collective).md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4bd41caa --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anonymous (collective).md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Anonymous + - Hacktivist + - 4chan + - LulzSec + - Chanology + - OperationPayback +alias: + - Anonymous (hacker group) + - Anonymous collective +summary: "Anonymous is a decentralized international hacktivist collective that originated on the 4chan imageboard in 2003, whose operations including Project Chanology (2008), Operation Payback (2010), and the LulzSec spin-off (2011) established the tactical repertoire of distributed online direct action that was later adopted by the alt-right and other political actors." +start: 2003 +location: "Distributed (originated on 4chan)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Anonymous is a decentralized international collective of hacktivists that originated on the [[4chan]] imageboard in 2003. The collective has no formal leadership, no membership roster, and no single ideological program, and operates through the coordination of ad hoc operations under the shared banner. The early Anonymous operations ([[Project Chanology|Project Chanology]] in 2008, [[Operation Payback|Operation Payback]] in 2010) established the tactical repertoire of distributed online direct action, including the [[DDoS|distributed-denial-of-service]] attack, the coordinated swarm, the [[doxxing|doxxing]] campaign, and the mass-action framing of individual contributions as participation in a collective political act. The tactical repertoire developed by Anonymous was subsequently adopted, with different political content, by the [[alt-right]], by [[Gamergate]], and by the broader far-right online ecosystem of the 2014-2020 period.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Origins on 4chan and the Collective Form + +Anonymous emerged from the posting culture of 4chan, the imageboard created by [[Christopher Poole|moot]] (Christopher Poole) in 2003, where all posts were by default signed "Anonymous." The shared author name produced the collective identity: Anonymous was not a membership organization but a label claimed by anyone posting under the default name, and the early "operations" were coordinated on the /b/ (random) board as in-jokes and pranks. The movement's defining early document is the /b/ post "Rules of the Internet," which codified the imageboard norms of anonymity, lulz (schadenfreude-derived humor), and the refusal of earnest political framing.[^1][^3] + +The [[Dale Beran|Dale Beran]] analysis of the imageboard-to-politics pipeline traces how the Anonymous collective's early pranks (the [[Hal Turner|Hal Turner]] raids, the [[Habbo Hotel|Habbo Hotel]] raids) established the operational template that later operations applied to political targets. The key innovation was the distributed, leaderless structure: anyone could claim the Anonymous label and organize an operation, and the absence of formal leadership made the collective difficult to prosecute or infiltrate. The same structure was later the feature that permitted the alt-right and the Gamergate campaign to operate without identifiable leadership.[^3][^4] + +### Project Chanology (2008) + +Project Chanology was the first widely noted Anonymous operation directed at a political target. In January 2008, Anonymous organized a campaign against the [[Church of Scientology]] after the church attempted to suppress the circulation of an internal Tom Cruise interview through legal threats. The operation's [[YouTube]] declaration video, delivered in the synthesized voice that became the Anonymous signature, accumulated more than 1.7 million views. The campaign included DDoS attacks on Scientology websites, pranks, and a coordinated series of in-person protests outside Scientology centers worldwide on February 10 and March 15, 2008.[^2] + +Project Chanology marks the transition at which Anonymous moved from pranks to political operations. The campaign's combination of online attacks and real-world protest, its use of the [[V for Vendetta|V for Vendetta]] [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes mask]] as the public-facing symbol (drawn from the [[V for Vendetta (film)|2005 film]]), and its organizational structure (ad hoc coordination on 4chan, IRC, and the [[WhyWeProtest|WhyWeProtest]] forums) established the template for all subsequent Anonymous operations.[^2] + +### Operation Payback and the WikiLeaks Defense (2010) + +Operation Payback began in September 2010 as an Anonymous campaign against anti-piracy organizations, but expanded in December 2010 into the defense of [[WikiLeaks]] after the major U.S. payment processors ([[PayPal]], [[Visa]], [[Mastercard]]) and [[Amazon Web Services]] cut off services to WikiLeaks following the publication of the [[Cablegate|Cablegate]] diplomatic cables. Anonymous coordinated DDoS attacks against the payment processors and against [[Amazon|Amazon.com]], framing the action as a defense of free speech against corporate-state censorship.[^1] + +Operation Payback is where Anonymous's tactics first intersected the WikiLeaks disclosure infrastructure and the broader state-press conflict. The same operational infrastructure subsequently fed into the [[LulzSec|LulzSec]] spin-off (2011) and into the [[Operation Anti-Security|AntiSec]] movement, which targeted law enforcement and intelligence agencies and whose arrests and prosecutions ran through 2012.[^1] + +### LulzSec, Sabu, and the FBI Infiltration (2011) + +LulzSec (Lulz Security) was a six-person Anonymous spin-off that conducted a 50-day hacking spree in 2011, targeting the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], [[Sony]], [[PBS]], the [[Serious Organised Crime Agency|UK Serious Organised Crime Agency]], and the [[Arizona Department of Public Safety|Arizona Department of Public Safety]]. The group's operations were conducted "for the lulz" rather than under a political banner, though the targeting of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies placed the campaign in the political-hacktivist lineage. The group's leader, [[Hector Monsegur|Hector "Sabu" Monsegur]], was arrested in June 2011 and turned FBI informant, and the subsequent cooperation led to the arrests of the other LulzSec members across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland through 2012.[^1] + +The Sabu case was the first documented FBI use of a turned hacktivist as a cooperating informant against the collective, and the pattern of arrest-and-inform became the recurring law-enforcement response to Anonymous-linked operations. The collective's decentralized structure, which had made it difficult to prosecute, also made individual members vulnerable to isolation and turn once identified.[^1] + +### Gamergate and the Alt-Right Adoption + +The Anonymous tactical repertoire was adopted by Gamergate in 2014, with the critical difference that the political content shifted from the Anonymous-left hacktivism of the 2008-2012 period to a right-wing cultural-reactionary campaign. The same imageboards (4chan and [[8chan]]), the same operational structures (ad hoc coordination on [[IRC]] and the boards, distributed swarm harassment, doxxing), and the same collective identity (Anonymous-as-label rather than Anonymous-as-membership) hosted both the Anonymous operations and the Gamergate campaign. The Beran analysis documents the continuity, and the [[Guardian]] and [[Data & Society Research Institute|Data & Society]] reporting extends the line to the alt-right and the 2016 [[Donald Trump|Trump]] campaign.[^3][^5][^6] + +The [[Breitbart News|Breitbart]]-[[Mike Cernovich|Cernovich]]-alt-right media infrastructure that amplified Gamergate overlapped with the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel]] political projects of the 2016-2024 period. The overlap runs through shared media infrastructure and shared platforms rather than through direct organizational contact.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For the Anonymous chronology, Project Chanology, Operation Payback, LulzSec, and the Sabur case, see the contemporaneous press (the *New York Times*, *The Guardian*, *Wired*) and the CNBC overview "What is Anonymous? From 4chan to cyberattacks." +[^2]: "Hackers declare war on Scientologists." *The Guardian,* February 4, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/04/news +[^3]: Beran, Dale. *It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office.* St. Martin's Press, 2019. +[^4]: "Hacktivism: Anonymous." *Purdue cyberTAP.* https://cyber.tap.purdue.edu/blog/articles/hacktivism-anonymous/ +[^5]: Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. "Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online." *Data & Society Research Institute,* 2017. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf +[^6]: "What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'." *The Guardian,* December 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..600c108d --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Anthropic + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - FTX + - AISafety +summary: "Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu around the goal of safe AI development, whose 2022 Series B was led by a 500 million dollar investment from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX before its fraud collapse." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in May 2021 by seven former [[OpenAI]] researchers, led by the siblings [[Dario Amodei]] (chief executive) and [[Daniela Amodei]] (president), who left OpenAI over disagreements about its direction and its balance between commercialization and safety. The founders came out of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and built the company explicitly around the thesis that advanced AI should be developed with extreme caution, the same existential-risk concern that runs through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the institutions [[Peter Thiel]] funded through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]. Its 2022 funding round was led by a 500 million dollar investment from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] months before his [[FTX]] exchange collapsed in fraud.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Governance + +The Amodeis and their cofounders, including [[Tom Brown]], [[Jack Clark]], [[Jared Kaplan]], [[Sam McCandlish]], and [[Chris Olah]], incorporated Anthropic as a public-benefit corporation and built an unusual governance structure, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, intended to give a body insulated from shareholders the power to appoint directors and to weight safety over profit. The arrangement mirrored the nonprofit-control structure that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis. Daniela Amodei is married to [[Holden Karnofsky]], cofounder of the effective-altruism organizations [[GiveWell]] and [[Open Philanthropy]], which was an early Anthropic funder; Karnofsky later joined the company.[^2][^3] + +The Long-Term Benefit Trust was formally established in September 2023, holding a special class of stock (Class T shares) that gives it authority to elect and remove Anthropic directors on time- and funding-based milestones, phasing up to a majority of the board within four years. Its five founding trustees were [[Neil Buddy Shah]] of the [[Clinton Health Access Initiative]] as chair, [[Jason Matheny]] of the [[RAND Corporation]], [[Kanika Bahl]] of [[Evidence Action]], the alignment researcher [[Paul Christiano]] of the [[Alignment Research Center]], and [[Zach Robinson]] of [[Effective Ventures US]], several of them figures from the effective-altruism and AI-safety world. Matheny stepped down in December 2023 to avoid conflicts with RAND's policy work, and Christiano left in April 2024 to lead AI safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute, with the trust later adding [[Richard Fontaine]] of the Center for a New American Security and the former California Supreme Court justice [[Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar]].[^6][^7] + +### FTX Funding and the Effective-Altruism Tie + +In 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried invested approximately 500 million dollars in Anthropic's Series B through his trading firm [[Alameda Research]], taking about 86 percent of the round and roughly 8 percent of the company; the money came from FTX customer deposits. Dario Amodei has said he kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares because of "red flags." After the FTX fraud was exposed and Bankman-Fried convicted, the FTX bankruptcy estate sold the stake, and Amodei moved to distance himself and the company from the effective-altruism label even as the founders remained products of that milieu. Later funding rounds drew on [[Google]] and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]], carrying the company's valuation into the tens of billions of dollars.[^1][^4][^5] + +The April 2022 Series B that Bankman-Fried led raised 580 million dollars at a 4-billion-dollar valuation, with FTX cofounder [[Caroline Ellison]] also named in the round. The FTX estate disposed of the 8 percent stake in 2024 as Anthropic's value climbed: a March 2024 agreement sold about two-thirds of the shares (29.5 million shares to 24 buyers) for 884 million dollars, with ATIC Third International Investment Company, tied to the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund [[Mubadala]], buying roughly 500 million dollars of it and [[Jane Street Capital]], Fidelity-managed funds, and HOF Capital among the rest; a June 2024 sale of the remaining shares brought in over 450 million dollars. Anthropic's May 2023 Series C, led by [[Spark Capital]] with Google, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, had raised 450 million dollars, and the stake FTX paid 500 million dollars for would have been worth several billion at later valuations.[^8][^9] + +### The Funding Rounds + +Anthropic's first outside capital was a 124-million-dollar Series A in May 2021 led by [[Jaan Tallinn]], the Estonian programmer who had made his fortune as a founding engineer of [[Skype]], with participation from the investor [[James McClave]], [[Dustin Moskovitz]], [[Eric Schmidt]], and the [[Center for Emerging Risk Research]]. The lead and several of the backers came from the same effective-altruism and existential-risk donor world as the founders. The 580-million-dollar Series B that Bankman-Fried led the following year was followed in May 2023 by a 450-million-dollar Series C led by Spark Capital.[^10] + +From 2023 the valuation climbed through a rapid sequence of rounds funded increasingly by the largest technology firms and the late-stage growth funds. A March 2025 round of 3.5 billion dollars, led by [[Lightspeed Venture Partners]], valued the company at 61.5 billion dollars. In May 2026 it closed a 65-billion-dollar round, the largest in its history, at a 965-billion-dollar post-money valuation, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, [[Sequoia Capital]], Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital, briefly making it the most valuable private company in the artificial-intelligence industry, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic reported an annualized revenue run rate of about 47 billion dollars and confidentially filed for an initial public offering in mid-2026.[^11][^12] + +### The Amazon and Google Stakes + +The two largest strategic investors are Amazon and Google, which are also Anthropic's principal cloud and chip suppliers. Amazon committed up to 4 billion dollars in September 2023, beginning with 1.25 billion, and added a further 4 billion in November 2024 to reach 8 billion dollars in total, becoming Anthropic's primary training partner through [[Amazon Web Services]] and its Trainium chips. Google, which had put roughly 300 million dollars into the company for about a 10 percent stake in early 2023, committed up to 2 billion dollars later that year and more than 1 billion again in January 2025, holding a stake reported at around 14 percent and contractually capped near 15 percent.[^13][^14] + +The arrangement is partly circular: much of the money the two companies invest returns to them as payment for the computing capacity Anthropic rents to train and run its models. By 2026 the appreciation of the two stakes was large enough that the financial press reported the Anthropic holdings accounted for roughly half of the AI-related investment gains Google and Amazon booked in some quarters, gains the companies had not realized because they had not sold the shares.[^14][^15] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "From 500 million to 30 billion: SBF, in prison, has invested in the most valuable company in the AI era," on the FTX/Alameda investment in Anthropic. https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/019d08f7-792c-70db-a0d3-5654dd2b2eaf +[^2]: "Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, has a weird structure too," *Slate,* December 2023, on Anthropic's effective-altruism origins and the Long-Term Benefit Trust. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/anthropic-openai-board-trust-effective-altruism.html +[^3]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on the founding and the Karnofsky and Open Philanthropy ties. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^4]: "Dario Amodei's Ideological Reckoning: How Anthropic's CEO Is Distancing Himself From the Movement That Made Him," *WebProNews,* on the post-FTX distancing from effective altruism. https://www.webpronews.com/dario-amodeis-ideological-reckoning-how-anthropics-ceo-is-distancing-himself-from-the-movement-that-made-him/ +[^5]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction November 2, 2023; FTX estate disposition of the Anthropic stake reported in subsequent bankruptcy filings. +[^6]: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," Anthropic, September 2023, on the Class T shares, the four-year board-majority phase-in, and the founding trustees. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust +[^7]: "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust," Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 28, 2023, on the trustee roster and the Matheny and Christiano departures. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/10/28/anthropic-long-term-benefit-trust/ +[^8]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 29.5 million shares, 24 buyers, ATIC/Mubadala, Jane Street, Fidelity, and HOF Capital. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html +[^9]: "Anthropic raises $3.5 billion with new funding round," Techzine, on the April 2022 Series B (580 million dollars, 4-billion valuation, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison) and the May 2023 Spark Capital Series C. https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/129278/anthropic-raises-3-5-billion-with-new-funding-round/ +[^10]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems +[^11]: "Anthropic reaches $61.5B valuation after latest funding round," Seeking Alpha, March 2025, on the 3.5-billion-dollar round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a 61.5-billion-dollar valuation. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4416449-anthropic-reaches-61_5b-valuation-after-latest-funding-round +[^12]: "Anthropic raises $65 billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO," TechCrunch, May 28, 2026, on the 65-billion-dollar round at a 965-billion-dollar valuation co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1, the 47-billion-dollar revenue run rate, and the value surpassing OpenAI; and "Anthropic confidentially files for IPO after raising $65 billion," Fortune, June 1, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/ +[^13]: "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic: $8B bet to power the future of AI," Tech Funding News, on Amazon's September 2023 commitment of up to 4 billion dollars and the additional 4 billion in November 2024 for 8 billion total through Amazon Web Services and Trainium. https://techfundingnews.com/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment-strategy/ +[^14]: "Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic," CNBC, January 22, 2025, on Google's roughly 300 million dollars for about 10 percent in early 2023, the up-to-2-billion-dollar commitment, the further more-than-1-billion in January 2025, and the stake reported near 14 percent capped at 15 percent. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/google-agrees-to-new-1-billion-investment-in-anthropic.html +[^15]: "Half of Google's and Amazon's 'blowout AI profits' came from a stake in Anthropic, not from their actual business," Fortune, April 30, 2026, on the unrealized gains from the Anthropic stakes and the cloud-payment arrangement. https://fortune.com/2026/04/30/google-amazon-ai-profits-anthropic-stake-bubble-earnings-2026/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Apollo Global Management.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Apollo Global Management.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..76bdfa22 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Apollo Global Management.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Apollo + - PrivateEquity + - LeonBlack + - JeffreyEpstein + - DrexelBurnham + - Finance +alias: + - Apollo Advisors + - Apollo Global Management Inc +summary: "Private-equity and credit firm founded in 1990 by Leon Black and other Drexel Burnham Lambert alumni, whose co-founder's roughly 158 million dollars in payments to Jeffrey Epstein triggered an independent review, Black's 2021 resignation, and a Senate investigation." +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Apollo Global Management is an American alternative-asset management firm founded in 1990 and headquartered in [[New York]]. It was built by [[Leon Black]] and other alumni of the collapsed investment bank [[Drexel Burnham Lambert]] into one of the largest managers of private-equity, credit, and insurance assets in the world. The firm's co-founder and longtime leader, Black, resigned as chief executive and chairman in 2021 after the disclosure that he had paid [[Jeffrey Epstein]] about 158 million dollars for tax and estate advice, a relationship that prompted an independent board review, a U.S. Senate investigation, and, in 2026, shareholder suits alleging the firm concealed the extent of the ties.[^1][^2] + +### Founding From Drexel + +Apollo grew directly out of the 1990 bankruptcy of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm where Black had been head of mergers and acquisitions alongside the junk-bond financier [[Michael Milken]]. Black founded the firm, initially called Apollo Advisors, with the former Drexel executives [[Josh Harris]] and [[Marc Rowan]], and the early partnership drew in other Drexel veterans including [[Tony Ressler]], who later left to found [[Ares Management]]. The firm assembled a team experienced in high-yield debt at the moment the junk-bond market was distressed and many such securities could be bought cheaply.[^3] + +One of Apollo's formative transactions was its role in the acquisition of the junk-bond portfolio of the failed insurer [[Executive Life]], whose assets were taken over with financing from the French bank [[Credit Lyonnais]]. Federal authorities later alleged that Credit Lyonnais had illegally used front companies to acquire the insurer in violation of laws barring banks from owning insurers, and the matter produced one of the largest such settlements, in the mid-2000s. Apollo and Black profited substantially from the distressed portfolio, and the deal established the firm's early returns.[^3] + +### Growth, Credit, and Athene + +Apollo expanded from distressed-debt investing into leveraged buyouts, corporate private equity, and a large credit business, growing to hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management. The firm listed on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in 2011 under the ticker APO. Black served as chairman and chief executive throughout this period and became one of the wealthiest figures in American finance and a major art collector and museum patron.[^3] + +A central part of Apollo's later growth was its relationship with the annuities and retirement-services company [[Athene]], founded in 2009 and managed in close affiliation with Apollo, which supplied a large, permanent capital base for Apollo's credit strategies. Apollo and Athene completed an all-stock merger in 2022, folding the insurer fully into the firm and making retirement-services and insurance assets a core of the business. The combination gave Apollo one of the largest pools of insurance-linked investable capital among alternative managers.[^3] + +### The Epstein Scandal and the Leadership Transition + +Press and investor scrutiny of Black's financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein led Apollo's board to commission an independent review by the law firm [[Dechert]], released on January 25, 2021, which documented about 158 million dollars in payments from Black to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for tax and estate-planning work and reported no evidence that Black participated in Epstein's crimes. The board accepted the findings and announced governance changes and a leadership transition the same day, with Black to step down as chief executive and Marc Rowan to succeed him.[^1][^2] + +Black left more abruptly than planned, relinquishing the chairmanship as well on March 22, 2021, and Rowan became chief executive. Black publicly accused his co-founder Josh Harris of working to push him out, and the two men's feud played out in the financial press as Harris departed the firm. Rowan consolidated leadership and continued Apollo's expansion, while the Senate Finance Committee's investigation into Black's Epstein-linked tax planning, opened under Ranking Member [[Ron Wyden]], continued into 2026.[^2][^4] + +In 2026, after further Epstein file releases renewed attention to Black and Apollo, the firm faced securities-fraud class-action suits alleging that it had failed to disclose to shareholders the scope of Black's dealings with Epstein and the resulting risks. Apollo has said Black's relationship with Epstein was a personal matter unrelated to the firm's business, a characterization the plaintiffs dispute.[^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Apollo Announces Review of Significant Governance Enhancements as Part of Continued Evolution and Institutionalization of the Firm and Leadership Transition." *Apollo Global Management,* January 25, 2021. https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2021/01/apollo-announces-review-of-significant-governance-enhancements-as-part-of-continued-evolution-and-institutionalization-of-the-firm-and-leadership-transition-211534651 +[^2]: "Leon Black quits Apollo months earlier than expected following Jeffrey Epstein investment scandal." *CNBC,* March 22, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/apollo-ceo-leon-black-leaves-follows-jeffrey-epstein-investment-scandal.html +[^3]: For Apollo's founding from Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Executive Life and Credit Lyonnais matter, the firm's growth and 2011 listing, and the Athene relationship and 2022 merger, see the contemporaneous business press and the firm's corporate filings. +[^4]: "How Wall Street's Apollo got tangled up again in the Epstein files." *CNN Business,* February 21, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/21/business/apollo-epstein-wall-street +[^5]: "Apollo, Leon Black sued for allegedly concealing Epstein business ties from shareholders." *Yahoo Finance / Reuters,* 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apollo-leon-black-sued-allegedly-004535212.html diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..54ad6a50 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - BerkeleyExistentialRiskInitiative + - ExistentialRisk + - EffectiveAltruism + - AISafety + - JaanTallinn +alias: + - Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative + - BERI +summary: "The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative is the nonprofit founded in 2017 by Andrew Critch that provides free operational support and grants to university research groups working on existential risk, funded chiefly by Jaan Tallinn and Open Philanthropy." +location: "Berkeley, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is an American nonprofit founded in 2017 that supports academic research groups studying risks to the long-term survival of humanity. Its distinctive method is to supply university centers with services and staff that universities are slow to provide, hiring contractors, engineers, and assistants and handling logistics on behalf of researchers, and it also makes grants to such groups. BERI is funded chiefly by the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]] and by [[Open Philanthropy]], and it has served as an operational and grantmaking intermediary in the existential-risk and AI-safety field, including for Tallinn's [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]].[^1][^2] + +### The 2017 Founding and the Free-Services Model + +BERI was founded in 2017 by [[Andrew Critch]], a mathematician and AI-safety researcher then associated with the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the University of California, Berkeley, and it registered as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity based in Berkeley. The organization's premise is that university research centers working on existential risk are often hamstrung by the administrative limits of their host institutions, which are slow to hire support staff, buy equipment, or pay outside contractors, and that an external nonprofit can act as a force multiplier by providing those things quickly and flexibly. Since 2020 BERI has been run by its executive director Sawyer Bernath.[^1][^3] + +In practice BERI offers what it calls free services to the groups it collaborates with, paying for research assistants, software engineers, technical writers, translators, editors, event logistics, and computing resources, so that academic researchers can concentrate on their work rather than on procurement and administration. The model treats the bottleneck on existential-risk research as operational rather than purely intellectual, and BERI positions itself as the back-office and funding hub that removes that bottleneck for the centers it works with.[^1][^3] + +### The University Collaborations + +BERI's central activity is a set of collaborations with university research groups, the most prominent of which is the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at the University of California, Berkeley, the AI-safety laboratory led by the computer scientist [[Stuart Russell]]. Through these collaborations BERI hires and pays people who work alongside the academic centers without being on the university payroll, and it has at various times worked with groups including the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]] at Cambridge and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at Oxford.[^3][^4] + +The arrangement extends the reach of donors who want to support a university center but find that the university itself cannot easily absorb or spend the money. By channeling support through BERI, a funder can pay for the staff and services a center needs without navigating the institution's bureaucracy, an approach BERI has described as building trust-based relationships with a small number of research groups rather than making open grant competitions its main work.[^3][^4] + +### Funding + +BERI is funded by the same small set of donors that supports much of the existential-risk and AI-safety field. As of July 2022 the organization reported having received more than 7 million dollars from Jaan Tallinn, more than 3.3 million dollars from Open Philanthropy, more than 1.6 million dollars from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, 100,000 dollars from the [[FTX Future Fund]], and roughly 5 million dollars from other funders. Tallinn is its single largest backer.[^2][^5] + +BERI announced its first grants program in September 2017, and its early grantmaking, funded by Tallinn, was one of the channels through which his existential-risk giving flowed before he formalized the Survival and Flourishing Fund and its S-process in 2019; BERI has continued to act as a grantmaking and fiscal intermediary that distributes some of the funds the S-process recommends. The concentration of its support among a handful of donors, principally Tallinn and Open Philanthropy, mirrors the funding structure of the wider field it serves.[^2][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Info," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the mission to improve civilization's long-term prospects, the collaboration-with-university-groups strategy, the free-services model, the 2017 founding by Andrew Critch, and the leadership of Sawyer Bernath since 2020. https://www.beri.org/ +[^2]: "Our Funding" and financial disclosures, Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the July 2022 totals of more than 7 million dollars from Jaan Tallinn, more than 3.3 million from Open Philanthropy, more than 1.6 million from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, 100,000 dollars from the FTX Future Fund, and about 5 million from other funders. https://www.beri.org/ +[^3]: "Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative," Effective Altruism Forum topic entry, on the 2017 founding by Andrew Critch, the operational-support model, and the work with university groups. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/berkeley-existential-risk-initiative +[^4]: "Collaborations," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, on the partnership with the Center for Human-Compatible AI under Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley and other research groups. https://www.beri.org/collaborations +[^5]: "March 2017: Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative," Effective Altruism Funds, on early grant support to BERI. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/payouts/march-2017-berkeley-existential-risk-initiative-beri +[^6]: "Announcing BERI's first grants program," Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, September 25, 2017, on the first grants program funded by Jaan Tallinn. https://existence.org/2017/09/25/announcing-beris-first-grants-program.html diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Blockstream.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Blockstream.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..33389040 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Blockstream.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Blockstream + - Bitcoin + - Cryptocurrency + - Sidechains + - LightningNetwork + - AdamBack +alias: + - Blockstream + - Blockstream Corporation +summary: "Blockstream is the Bitcoin-infrastructure company that Adam Back and others founded in 2014, builder of the Liquid sidechain and the Core Lightning implementation, employer of several Bitcoin Core developers, and a $3.2 billion firm after its 2021 Series B." +location: "Victoria, British Columbia" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Blockstream is a blockchain technology company founded in 2014 to build infrastructure for [[Bitcoin]], cofounded by the cryptographer [[Adam Back]], who serves as its chief executive, along with the entrepreneur Austin Hill, the Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille, Erik Svenson, and others. The company originated the concept of pegged sidechains, develops the Liquid Network sidechain and the Core Lightning implementation of the Lightning Network, runs a Bitcoin mining business, and employs several of the developers who maintain the Bitcoin Core software. A 2021 Series B financing valued it at 3.2 billion dollars.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the Sidechains Paper + +Blockstream was incorporated in 2014, drawing together a group of established Bitcoin engineers and cryptographers, with Back as chief executive and Austin Hill among the founders. In October 2014 the founding team published the white paper "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains," whose authors were Back, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille. The paper proposed letting bitcoins move between the main Bitcoin blockchain and separate chains through a two-way peg, so that new features could be tested and run on a sidechain while remaining denominated in bitcoin and pegged to the main ledger.[^3][^4] + +The premise was that experimental functions which Bitcoin's conservative development process would not adopt directly, such as confidential transaction amounts, faster settlement, or the issuance of other assets, could be deployed on a pegged sidechain that borrowed Bitcoin's currency without altering Bitcoin itself. The company raised a 21 million dollar seed round in 2014 and a 55 million dollar Series A in 2016, with investors including the venture firm Horizons Ventures and AXA Strategic Ventures.[^1][^2] + +### Liquid, Core Lightning, and Other Products + +Blockstream's principal sidechain product is the Liquid Network, which it launched in 2018 as a federation operated by exchanges, brokers, and trading desks. Liquid is a Bitcoin layer built on Blockstream's open-source Elements platform; it offers faster and final settlement than the main chain, confidential transactions that hide amounts and asset types, and the issuance of tokens including stablecoins, and it is secured by a federation of functionaries rather than by open proof-of-work mining. Blockstream initially launched Liquid with about two dozen institutional members.[^5][^6] + +The company also develops Core Lightning, formerly named c-lightning, one of the principal implementations of the Lightning Network, a system of off-chain payment channels that settles small Bitcoin transactions rapidly and cheaply before recording net results on the main chain. Its other products include Blockstream Satellite, which broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain from space so that nodes can stay synchronized without a conventional internet connection, the open-source Blockstream Jade hardware wallet, and an enterprise mining and hosting business that the company expanded after acquiring the ASIC maker Spondoolies.[^6][^7] + +### Funding and Bitcoin Core Developers + +In August 2021 Blockstream closed a 210 million dollar Series B financing that valued the company at 3.2 billion dollars, a round led by Baillie Gifford and iFinex, the operator of the Bitfinex exchange, with the proceeds directed at expanding the mining business and the Liquid Network. The Series B made the Victoria, British Columbia, company one of the more highly valued firms built specifically around Bitcoin infrastructure.[^8][^2] + +Blockstream has employed a number of the developers who write and maintain Bitcoin Core, the dominant implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, a fact that has drawn both credit for funding open-source work and criticism that a single private company exercises outsized influence over the protocol's direction. Cofounder Pieter Wuille, a longtime Bitcoin Core maintainer who led the Segregated Witness upgrade, worked at Blockstream before leaving for the payments company Chaincode Labs in 2023. The company's research division, Blockstream Research, has employed Andrew Poelstra, a coinventor of the Taproot upgrade, Bulletproofs, and Confidential Assets, and Russell O'Connor, author of the experimental blockchain programming language Simplicity.[^9][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Blockstream," *Bitcoin Wiki,* on the 2014 founding, Adam Back as chief executive, Austin Hill and the cofounders, the seed and Series A rounds, and the product line. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blockstream +[^2]: "A Deep Look at the Company Blockstream and Their Bitcoin Technology," *Blockonomi,* on the founders, sidechains, Liquid, Lightning, the funding history, and the 3.2 billion dollar valuation. https://blockonomi.com/blockstream-bitcoin/ +[^3]: Back, Adam, et al. "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains," October 2014, the pegged-sidechains white paper and its author list. https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf +[^4]: "Blockstream Releases Sidechain White Paper on Liquid and Strong Federations," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on the October 2014 sidechains paper and the two-way peg concept. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/blockstream-releases-sidechain-white-paper-liquid-and-strong-federations +[^5]: "Liquid: A Bitcoin Sidechain," Blockstream, on the Liquid federation, confidential transactions, asset issuance, and the 2018 launch with institutional members. https://blockstream.com/assets/downloads/pdf/liquid-whitepaper.pdf +[^6]: "About," Blockstream, on the 2014 founding, the founders, and the products Liquid Network, Core Lightning, Blockstream Satellite, Blockstream Jade, and Elements, and the research program. https://blockstream.com/about/ +[^7]: "Blockstream 2018 Review: Countdown to Ignition," Blockstream, on the launch of the Liquid Network and c-lightning and the mining and satellite products. https://blockstream.com/2019/01/03/en-blockstream-2018-review +[^8]: "Blockstream Secures $210M Series B Financing," Blockstream, on the August 2021 round, the 3.2 billion dollar valuation, the lead investors Baillie Gifford and iFinex, and the mining and Liquid focus. https://blog.blockstream.com/en-blockstream-secures-210m-series-b-financing/ +[^9]: "The Focus of Blockstream Research," Blockstream, on the research division and its developers including Andrew Poelstra and Russell O'Connor, and on Pieter Wuille's Bitcoin Core maintainership. https://blog.blockstream.com/blockstream-research-the-focus/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/CCRU.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/CCRU.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..61146267 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/CCRU.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - CCRU + - CyberneticCultureResearchUnit + - NickLand + - SadiePlant + - MarkFisher + - Accelerationism + - Hyperstition + - UniversityOfWarwick +alias: + - Cybernetic Culture Research Unit +summary: "The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental research collective established at the University of Warwick philosophy department in the mid-1990s by Nick Land and Sadie Plant, whose members included Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun, and whose output blended philosophy, cybernetics, science fiction, and music theory to produce the accelerationist and hyperstitional frameworks that subsequently fed into the Dark Enlightenment." +location: "University of Warwick, Coventry, England" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +The [[CCRU|Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)]] was an experimental research collective established at the [[University of Warwick|University of Warwick]] philosophy department in the mid-1990s. The CCRU was co-founded by [[Nick Land|Nick Land]] and [[Sadie Plant|Sadie Plant]] and its core members included [[Mark Fisher|Mark Fisher]], [[Kodwo Eshun|Kodwo Eshun]], and [[Steve Goodman|Steve Goodman]] (who operated as the musician [[Kode9|Kode9]]). The CCRU's output blended philosophy, cybernetics, [[Afrofuturism|Afrofuturism]], science fiction, and music theory, and produced the [[Accelerationism|accelerationist]] and [[hyperstition|hyperstitional]] frameworks that subsequently fed into the [[Dark Enlightenment|Dark Enlightenment]] and [[Neoreaction|neoreaction]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Warwick Period and the Practice + +The CCRU emerged from Land's Warwick orbit around 1995, outside the normal philosophy-departmental structure. Land, appointed to the Warwick philosophy department in the late 1980s after completing his doctorate at the [[University of Essex|University of Essex]] on [[Georges Bataille|Georges Bataille]], had built a cult following among philosophy students for his intensity and his departure from the conventional analytic-philosophy curriculum. The CCRU functioned as a research collective whose self-described practice was "conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources."[^1][^2] + +The CCRU's output included academic papers, performative lectures, the [[Virtual Futures|Virtual Futures]] conferences, and a body of hyperstitional texts written as if the cybernetic fictions they described were real. The hyperstition practice is the CCRU's documented methodological innovation: the production of fictions that make themselves real through the act of propagation. The practice is the philosophical ancestor of the [[Chan ARG Ecosystem|chan-ARG hyperstitional tradition]] (including [[TheGame23|TheGame23]]) and of the broader internet-native narrative-production forms that descend from it.[^2][^3] + +### The Accelerationist Argument + +Land's CCRU-era argument held that capitalism and technological change are not instruments to be steered by political will but forces that are themselves doing the steering. The argument drew on [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]]'s concept of [[deterritorialization|deterritorialization]], on [[Bataille|Bataille]]'s accursed-share economics of excess, and on the cybernetic theory of [[Norbert Wiener|Norbert Wiener]] to produce the framing that techno-capitalism is an autonomous, self-optimizing process that will dissolve the existing order. The CCRU's accelerationism is the philosophical ancestor of both the left-accelerationism (which retains the political-steering element) and Land's subsequent right-accelerationism (which drops the steering and argues for pure acceleration of the autonomous process).[^1][^2] + +Land set out the argument in the Warwick-era texts "Machinic Desire" (1993) and "Meltdown" (1994), the latter framing capitalism as drawn toward a "technocapital singularity" in which markets, intelligence, and machinery fuse into a single inhuman circuit of escalation, and asking "does anything human make it out of the near future?"[^4] These papers, long circulated in samizdat, were collected with the rest of Land's 1987-2007 output in *Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007* (Urbanomic/Sequence Press, March 2011), edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier.[^5] The CCRU lineage split along political lines in 2013, when Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (students of Brassier, himself a Warwick contemporary of Fisher) published "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," which retained the demand to harness technological acceleration toward egalitarian ends, while Land, by then writing from Shanghai, pushed the opposite reading toward the antiegalitarian Dark Enlightenment he named in his 2012 essay of that title.[^6] + +### The Aftermath and the Intellectual Lineage + +Land left Warwick around 1998 amid a combination of intellectual exhaustion, amphetamine use, and mental-health crisis documented in Fisher's writing and the retrospective CCRU accounts. The CCRU dissolved, and its members dispersed. Land relocated to [[Shanghai|Shanghai]] and developed the Dark Enlightenment synthesis with [[Curtis Yarvin|Yarvin]]. Fisher published *[[Capitalist Realism|Capitalist Realism]]* (2009) and became an influential cultural theorist before his death in 2017. Eshun published *[[More Brilliant than the Sun|More Brilliant than the Sun]]* (1998) on Afrofuturism and sonic fiction. Goodman established the [[Hyperdub|Hyperdub]] record label.[^1][^2] + +Fisher began the k-punk blog in 2003 as a continuation of the CCRU's theory-fiction register, then turned it toward a left politics his 2012 essay "Terminator vs. Avatar" used to credit Land's diagnosis while rejecting his abandonment of "the human side"; Fisher took his own life on January 13, 2017.[^7] Land's later trajectory ran the CCRU vocabulary in the opposite direction: his neoreactionary writing was adopted by the American alt-right, and the hyperstition and accelerationist registers were recycled a third time in the "effective accelerationism" (e/acc) movement that circulated among [[Silicon Valley|Silicon Valley]] technologists from 2022 onward. The shared origin point means a single Warwick-era body of texts now feeds the left-accelerationist, neoreactionary, and e/acc currents simultaneously, each citing the same source material toward incompatible ends.[^4][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For the CCRU's founding, members, and Warwick period, see the retrospective accounts of CCRU members and the [[Monoskop|Monoskop]] archive. +[^2]: For Land's CCRU-era accelerationism and the hyperstition practice, see the Nick Land page and the Chan ARG Ecosystem page for the hyperstition lineage. +[^3]: "Forward? A Short History of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit." *Medium.* https://medium.com/@sam.mcilhagga/forward-a-short-history-of-the-cybernetic-culture-research-unit-cdbd4c18061a +[^4]: "What is Nick Land's philosophy of accelerationism really?" *Aeon.* https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really . Land's "Meltdown" (1994) and "Machinic Desire" (1993) are collected in *Fanged Noumena* (see note 5). +[^5]: Land, Nick. *Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007.* Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier. Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011. https://www.urbanomic.com/book/fanged-noumena/ +[^6]: Williams, Alex, and Nick Srnicek. "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," 2013; Land, Nick. "The Dark Enlightenment" (series), 2012 onward. For the left/right split and the e/acc revival, see "What is Accelerationism?" *Reality Studies.* https://www.realitystudies.co/p/what-is-accelerationism-effective-eacc-nick-land-mark-fisher +[^7]: Fisher, Mark. *k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher,* ed. Darren Ambrose. Repeater Books, 2018; "Terminator vs Avatar" (2012). For Fisher's death, see the *Los Angeles Review of Books* essay on the *k-punk* collection. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-necessity-of-being-judgmental-on-k-punk-the-collected-and-unpublished-writings-of-mark-fisher/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Carbyne.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Carbyne.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6e8516aa --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Carbyne.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Carbyne + - Reporty + - Surveillance + - EhudBarak + - JeffreyEpstein + - Israel + - FoundersFund + - EmergencyTech +alias: + - Carbyne + - Reporty Homeland Security +summary: "Carbyne is an Israeli-American emergency-communication and surveillance technology company founded in Tel Aviv as Reporty Homeland Security, into which Jeffrey Epstein quietly invested approximately one million dollars in 2015 through an arrangement brokered by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and which has also received backing from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and has been deployed by U.S. police departments including Miami-Dade." +location: "Tel Aviv, Israel; New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Carbyne (originally incorporated as [[Reporty|Reporty Homeland Security]]) is an Israeli-American technology company that develops cloud-native emergency-communication and 911-response platforms providing real-time video, location, and data transmission from callers to emergency dispatchers. [[Forbes|Forbes]] reported in February 2026 that [[Jeffrey Epstein|Jeffrey Epstein]] quietly invested approximately one million dollars in Reporty in 2015 through an arrangement brokered by [[Ehud Barak|former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak]], after Epstein was already a registered sex offender. Carbyne has also received backing from [[Founders Fund]], the [[Peter Thiel|Peter Thiel]] venture firm, and has been deployed by U.S. police departments including the [[Miami-Dade Police Department|Miami-Dade Police Department]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Epstein-Barak Investment Arrangement (2015) + +Forbes reported in February 2026 (Thomas Brewster) that Barak helped Epstein invest approximately one million dollars in Reporty in 2015, an investment that could have grown to be worth up to one hundred million dollars. The arrangement was made after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement and his subsequent [[Florida|Florida]] sex-offender registration. Barak was a key figure in the company and channeled Epstein's money into the startup. The [[Miami Herald|Miami Herald]] reported separately that Epstein secretly funded the startup subsequently used by the Miami-Dade Police Department.[^1][^2] + +Through the Barak-Epstein-Carbyne arrangement, Epstein moved from social-network brokerage to direct commercial investment in surveillance-adjacent technology. Barak was the channel through which the investment was arranged. The company's emergency-response product integrates smartphone location, live video, and incident data into a centralized dispatcher view, and the same architecture supports population-level monitoring.[^1][^4] + +### The Founders Fund Backing + +Founders Fund is a documented backer of Carbyne, placing the company in the Thiel venture portfolio alongside [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]], [[Anduril Industries|Anduril]], and [[Clearview AI|Clearview]]. The Founders Fund backing and the Epstein-Barak investment ran alongside each other, meaning the company simultaneously held Epstein investment (brokered by the former Israeli prime minister Barak) and Thiel-network venture backing.[^1][^2][^3] + +Carbyne has been deployed in U.S. emergency-response systems including [[New Orleans|New Orleans]], where the platform was integrated into the city's 911 dispatch infrastructure. The Miami-Dade Police Department used the product that Epstein's money had funded, per the Miami Herald reporting on the Epstein-Carbyne investment chain. The documented deployment of an Epstein-funded product by a U.S. law-enforcement agency is the concrete operational outcome of the investment arrangement.[^1][^2] + +The simultaneous Epstein-Barak and Founders Fund backing of a single Israeli surveillance-tech startup connects three networks through one company: the Epstein-Barak Israeli-intelligence channel, the Thiel commercial network, and the Israeli surveillance-technology export sector (documented on the [[NSO Group|NSO Group]] and Barak pages). Carbyne is the node where all three converge in a single corporate entity.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Israeli Surveillance-Technology Export Context + +[[Jacobin|Jacobin]] reported in July 2023 that [[Israel|Israel]]'s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories has functioned as a "laboratory" for surveillance and security technology, giving Israeli firms specialized know-how in monitoring civilian populations. The Carbyne/Reporty emergency-response platform sits within this broader Israeli surveillance-technology export sector, and the [[Reason|Reason]] reporting on Epstein's spy-industry connections (August 2025) documented that Epstein and Barak marketed Israeli surveillance technology internationally, including to [[Nigeria|Nigeria]], with technology reportedly tested on Palestinian populations.[^4][^5] + +The [[Black Agenda Report|Black Agenda Report]] documented a parallel pipeline in which Israel's Gaza-tested biometric and surveillance scanners were routed into a Nigerian ports deal through [[United Arab Emirates|UAE]] channels. Nigeria is documented as [[Africa|Africa]]'s largest customer of surveillance-technology contracts, spending at least 470 million dollars on AI-powered surveillance devices. The Israeli surveillance-technology export sector, of which Carbyne is a part, operates across the documented chain from Palestinian-population testing through international marketing to deployment in authoritarian and democratic states alike.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Brewster, Thomas. "Epstein Could Have Made $100 Million On A Secret Police Tech Investment With Ehud Barak." *Forbes,* February 10, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/02/10/epstein-police-surveillance-investments-with-ehud-barak/ +[^2]: "Epstein secretly funded start-up used by Miami-Dade police." *Miami Herald,* 2020. +[^3]: "Founders Fund Invests in a 911 Startup Backed by Ehud Barak." *CTech (Calcalist),* documenting Peter Thiel's Founders Fund joining a Series B round in Carbyne/Reporty, the firm's first Israeli investment. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3744302,00.html +[^4]: "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's spy industry connections." *Reason,* August 27, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/08/27/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-spy-industry-connections/ +[^5]: "Israel Has Turned the Occupied Territories Into a Laboratory for Surveillance." *Jacobin,* July 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/07/israel-occupation-surveillance-security-state-technology-export +[^6]: "Epstein Flipped Israel's Gaza-Tested Biometric Scanners Into Nigeria Ports Deal." *Black Agenda Report.* For the Nigeria surveillance-technology spending, see the IDS Sussex and Punch Nigeria reporting. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for Applied Rationality.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for Applied Rationality.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f07a4d57 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for Applied Rationality.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - CFAR + - Rationalism + - MIRI + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism +alias: + - CFAR +summary: "The Center for Applied Rationality is a Berkeley nonprofit spun off from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2012 to teach rationality techniques through residential workshops, which served as a recruitment funnel for AI-safety work and whose 2019 alumni reunion was protested by the group that became the Zizians." +location: "Berkeley, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is a nonprofit founded in 2012 in [[Berkeley]], [[California]], as a spin-off of the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI), created to teach the reasoning techniques developed in the [[Rationalist Community]] through paid residential workshops. Its founders came from the MIRI orbit and included [[Anna Salamon]] and [[Julia Galef]]. CFAR shared personnel, premises, and an [[Effective Altruism]] donor base with MIRI, and its workshops functioned as a recruitment funnel that drew talented young people toward artificial-intelligence-safety work and the broader rationalist milieu.[^1][^2] + +### Workshops and the AI-Safety Funnel + +CFAR ran multi-day workshops teaching "applied rationality," a curriculum of decision-making, debiasing, and emotional-processing techniques. The founding instructor group, beyond Salamon and Galef, included [[Valentine Smith]] and the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]], and the organization began offering classes in 2012. A standard residential workshop ran four and a half days at a fee of 3,900 dollars, with scholarships and a free preliminary consultation; Galef served as president until 2016, when Salamon, who had come from MIRI, succeeded her. CFAR and MIRI shared offices in Berkeley.[^6][^7] + +The organization openly oriented its later programming toward AI-risk recruitment, holding specialized workshops, including dedicated "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" sessions run jointly with MIRI, to identify and route promising participants toward existential-risk work. The workshops, the group houses, and the annual alumni reunions formed the in-person spine of the Bay Area rationalist community during the 2010s. The curriculum borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy, debiasing research, and the community's own techniques such as "double crux" and "internal double crux," and the residential format placed instructors and participants in extended close contact that several later first-person accounts identified as a vector for the high-control dynamics that developed in the milieu.[^2][^6] + +### The Zizian Protest and the Abuse Accounts + +In November 2019 the group around [[Jack LaSota]] that became the [[The Zizians|Zizians]] protested a CFAR alumni reunion in [[Sonoma County]], appearing in masks and robes, blocking the entrances, and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four protesters were arrested.[^3] + +In 2021 a first-person account titled "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR" circulated on [[LessWrong]] alongside [[Zoe Curzi]]'s parallel writeup of [[Leverage Research]], describing psychological harm, high-control dynamics, and breakdowns in the MIRI and CFAR environment. A 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation gathered further accounts of abuse and coercion across the rationalist organizations. CFAR wound down its regular public workshop schedule around the start of the 2020s.[^4][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Center for Applied Rationality, founding 2012 as a spin-off of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; cross-referenced against the MIRI organizational timeline at timelines.issarice.com. +[^2]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer, and the rationalist community record on CFAR workshops and the AI-safety recruitment orientation; see *Rationality: From AI to Zombies.* Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. +[^3]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/ +[^4]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe +[^5]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," on the 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg +[^6]: "The 'Rationality' Workshop That Teaches People to Think More Like Computers," *Vice,* on the CFAR curriculum, the founders Salamon, Galef, Smith, and Critch, the 3,900 dollar fee, and the residential format. https://www.vice.com/en/article/center-for-applied-rationality/ +[^7]: Critch, Andrew, "The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)," acritch.com, on the founding group, the shared Berkeley offices with MIRI, and the Galef-to-Salamon presidential succession in 2016. https://acritch.com/cfar/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ed7aaf0b --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - CentreForTheStudyOfExistentialRisk + - ExistentialRisk + - ArtificialIntelligence + - JaanTallinn + - CambridgeUniversity +alias: + - CSER +summary: "The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is a Cambridge University research center founded in 2012 by the philosopher Huw Price, the cosmologist Martin Rees, and the Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn to study catastrophic risks from advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and environmental collapse." +location: "Cambridge, England" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is a research center within [[Cambridge University]] founded in 2012 to study risks that could threaten the survival of humanity, with a focus on those arising from advanced technology. It was established by the philosopher [[Huw Price]], the cosmologist [[Martin Rees]], and the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]], and it became one of the first academic homes for the study of [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]], biotechnology, and ecological risk, sharing personnel and concerns with the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] networks and with sister institutions such as the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at the [[University of Oxford]].[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Funding + +The center traces its origin to a 2011 conversation in a Copenhagen taxi, where Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, shared a ride with Tallinn on the way to a conference dinner and the two found common ground on the dangers of advanced AI. Price recruited Rees, the [[Astronomer Royal]] and a former president of the [[Royal Society]], and the three announced the center in 2012; Tallinn supplied the seed funding that paid for its establishment and early activities. The astrophysicist and policy researcher [[Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh]] served as founding executive director, building the center from concept to a staffed research group between 2013 and 2015 and leading its major projects through 2020.[^1][^3] + +Beyond Tallinn's private donation, CSER's research drew institutional support including funding from the [[Templeton World Charity Foundation]], which backed its "Managing Extreme Technological Risk" project. The center was housed administratively within the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge, giving an academic base to a field that had largely existed outside universities. Its founders assembled a scientific advisory board that included the physicist [[Stephen Hawking]], the AI researcher [[Stuart Russell]], the Harvard geneticist [[George Church]], the global-health figure [[Peter Piot]], and the entrepreneur [[Elon Musk]].[^2][^4] + +### Research and the Leverhulme Spin-Off + +CSER organizes its work around several families of catastrophic risk: risks from artificial intelligence and machine superintelligence, risks from biotechnology and engineered pandemics, environmental and ecological risk including climate change, and the broader study of how extreme technological risks should be governed. Its researchers produce academic papers, policy reports, and workshops, and the center has positioned itself as a bridge between the technical AI-safety community and mainstream science and policy institutions, in contrast to the more activist [[Future of Life Institute]] that Tallinn cofounded in 2014.[^2][^5] + +In 2016 CSER launched its first spin-off, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), a Cambridge-based center funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Price that concentrates on the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence over the long term. The two centers operate in close collaboration, with overlapping staff and research agendas, and together they made Cambridge one of the principal academic hubs for the study of AI risk in the United Kingdom. CSER has continued to publish on AI governance, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk under successive directors following Ó hÉigeartaigh's tenure.[^2][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "About Us," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, on the 2012 founding by Huw Price, Martin Rees, and Jaan Tallinn and the center's mission. https://www.cser.ac.uk/about-us/ +[^2]: "Could science destroy the world? These scholars want to save us from a modern-day Frankenstein," Science / AAAS, on the founders, the research areas of AI, biotech, and climate, the advisory board including Hawking, Russell, Church, Piot, and Musk, and Tallinn's funding. https://www.science.org/content/article/could-science-destroy-world-these-scholars-want-save-us-modern-day-frankenstein +[^3]: "Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, on the 2011 Copenhagen taxi meeting between Price and Tallinn, Tallinn's seed funding, and Ó hÉigeartaigh's role as founding executive director from 2013 to 2015. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/sean-o-heigeartaigh/ +[^4]: "Managing Extreme Technological Risk with the University of Cambridge," Templeton World Charity Foundation, on its funding of CSER's Managing Extreme Technological Risk project. https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/managing-extreme-technological-risk-university-cambridge-video +[^5]: "CSER: Playing with Technological Dominoes," Future of Life Institute, on CSER's research themes across AI, biotechnology, and environmental risk. https://futureoflife.org/biotech/playing-with-technological-dominoes/ +[^6]: "Huw Price," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, on the 2016 launch of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence as CSER's first spin-off, led by Price. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/huw-price-2/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Clearview AI.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Clearview AI.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..eb3577d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Clearview AI.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - ClearviewAI + - FacialRecognition + - Surveillance + - PeterThiel + - CharlesJohnson + - HoanTonThat + - FTC + - LawEnforcement +alias: + - Clearview AI Inc. +summary: "Clearview AI is a facial-recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, first funded by Peter Thiel before the company was even named, that scraped an estimated thirty billion images from social media and the open web to build a facial-identification database sold to law enforcement, and was the subject of a March 2022 FTC consent order barring it from selling the database to private entities." +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Clearview AI is an American facial-recognition company founded by [[Hoan Ton-That|Hoan Ton-That]] and [[Richard Schwartz|Richard Schwartz]] that built its database by scraping an estimated thirty billion images from social-media platforms and the open web, and sold facial-identification searches to law-enforcement agencies, government clients, and, in its early period, private actors. The [[Federal Trade Commission]] issued a consent order in March 2022 barring Clearview from selling or giving away access to its database to private entities and requiring deletion of data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company violated consumer-privacy law. [[Peter Thiel]] was the company's first investor, providing seed funding before Clearview was even named (when it operated under the name [[Smart Checker|Smart Checker]]), and the conservative provocateur [[Charles C. Johnson|Charles Johnson]] played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Founding and the Thiel Seed Investment + +Hoan Ton-That, an Australian-born software developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and political operative, founded Clearview AI in 2016-2017. The *New York Times* reported in March 2021 that Peter Thiel provided the seed funding for the company before it was even called Clearview AI, when it operated under the name Smart Checker. NPR confirmed in 2023 that Thiel was Clearview's first investor. Clearview was funded directly by Thiel rather than through [[Founders Fund]].[^1][^2][^4] + +The company's product is a facial-recognition search engine. A user uploads a photograph of a face, and the software searches the scraped-image database to return matching images and their source URLs. The database was built by automated scraping of public-facing images across social-media platforms ([[Facebook]], [[Instagram]], [[Twitter]], [[LinkedIn]], [[YouTube]], and others) and the open web. The platforms' terms of service prohibited the scraping; Clearview conducted it anyway. By 2020 the database was reported to contain over three billion images; by 2023, over thirty billion.[^1][^3] + +### Charles Johnson and the Hidden Cofounder Role + +Charles Johnson, described by the *New York Times* as a "notorious conservative provocateur," played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel in the company's formation. Johnson was a far-right media figure known for promoting debunked conspiracy theories (including the false claim that President [[Barack Obama|Obama]]'s National Security Advisor [[Susan Rice|Susan Rice]] had directed surveillance of the Trump campaign) and for his 2017 announcement that he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads."[^1][^5][^6] + +Johnson subsequently claimed to be a Clearview cofounder and sued the company for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025. The *Semafor* reporting (October 2024) documented a separate lawsuit alleging Johnson was "running a fraud and extortion scheme" and falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent. Johnson had also indicated he was a federal informant, as reported through the federal lawsuit against Clearview. The Johnson-Thiel relationship extends beyond Clearview: Johnson disclosed to the FBI that Thiel himself was an FBI informant, per the [[Business Insider]] reporting of October 2023, which documented Thiel's status as a confidential human source for the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]].[^5][^6][^7] + +### The FTC Consent Order and the Regulatory Record + +The FTC issued its consent order against Clearview in March 2022. The order barred Clearview from selling or giving away access to its facial-recognition database to any private entity and required the deletion of images and data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company's practices violated consumer-privacy law. The FTC found that Clearview had collected facial images without consent, had marketed the product to private entities (including a reported outreach to a [[Macy's|Macy's]] executive and the use of the product by a [[Kohl's|Kohl's]] loss-prevention team), and had failed to implement adequate privacy safeguards.[^3][^8] + +The Illinois [[Biometric Information Privacy Act|Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)]] produced a separate settlement in May 2022, in which Clearview agreed to restrict its use of collected face images in Illinois and to honor an opt-out mechanism for residents. The company withdrew from the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada after regulatory action in each jurisdiction. The combined regulatory record left Clearview's law-enforcement and government business intact while constraining its commercial and international operations.[^8][^9] + +### Law-Enforcement and Government Use + +Clearview's documented law-enforcement client base includes over a million searches conducted as of March 2023, per the Consumer Watchdog report. The company's product has been used by municipal police departments, federal agencies, and international law-enforcement bodies. The *BuzzFeed News* investigation documented that Clearview's secret early users included a former Trump staffer, conservative think tanks, and a range of private actors beyond the law-enforcement client base the company publicly acknowledged.[^3][^10] + +The [[U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement|ICE]] and the [[Department of Homeland Security|DHS]] are among the documented federal clients. The Clearview product supplies the same identity-resolution-from-public-data function that Palantir's Gotham platform supplies from classified and government-held data, and the two firms' products operate in adjacent segments of the federal surveillance infrastructure. [[Senator Ed Markey|Senator Ed Markey]] wrote to Ton-That in November 2023 raising civil-liberties concerns about the Clearview system's use, and the senator's letter is part of the public congressional record.[^3][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "What We Learned About Clearview AI's Hidden 'Co-Founder.'" *New York Times,* March 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/technology/clearview-facial-recognition-ai.html +[^2]: "Exposing the Secretive Company at the Forefront of Facial Recognition Technology." *NPR,* September 28, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology +[^3]: Consumer Watchdog. "Clearview AI" report, December 2023. https://consumerwatchdog.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Clearview-AI-Cover-Letter-and-Report.pdf +[^4]: For the Thiel seed investment predating the Clearview name (the Smart Checker period), see the *New York Times* and NPR reporting cited above. +[^5]: "Business Partner Sues Chuck Johnson for Falsely Presenting as Intelligence Agent." *Semafor,* October 16, 2024. https://www.semafor.com/article/10/16/2024/business-partner-sues-chuck-johnson-for-falsely-presenting-as-intelligence-agent +[^6]: "Legal battle over Clearview AI's origin takes a turn as accuser drops suit." *Biometric Update,* February 2025. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202502/legal-battle-over-clearview-ais-origin-takes-a-turn-as-accuser-drops-suit +[^7]: "Exclusive: Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Was an FBI Informant." *Business Insider,* October 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10 +[^8]: "Face-Scanner Clearview Agrees to Limits in Court Settlement." *WTTW,* May 10, 2022. https://news.wttw.com/2022/05/10/face-scanner-clearview-agrees-limits-court-settlement +[^9]: For the FTC March 2022 consent order, see the Federal Trade Commission's published order and decision. +[^10]: "Clearview AI's Secret Users Included A Former Trump Staffer, A Troll, And Conservative Think Tanks." *BuzzFeed News.* https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-trump-investors-friend-facial-recognition +[^11]: Senator Ed Markey. Letter to Hoan Ton-That, November 2023. https://www.markey.senate.gov/download/senator-markey-letter-to-clearview-ai_-112023pdf diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Deutsche Bank.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Deutsche Bank.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..073d0c52 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Deutsche Bank.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - JeffreyEpstein + - DeutscheBank + - Banking + - MoneyLaundering + - SexTrafficking + - ComplianceFailure + - ButterflyTrust +alias: + - Deutsche Bank AG + - Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas +summary: "German global bank that took Jeffrey Epstein as a client in 2013 after JPMorgan dropped him, processed suspicious payments to women and alleged co-conspirators despite internal warnings, and paid a 150 million dollar New York regulatory penalty and 75 million dollars to his victims." +location: "Frankfurt, Germany" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial institution headquartered in [[Frankfurt]], Germany, which operates a New York branch and a trust company, Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas, licensed by the [[New York Department of Financial Services]]. The bank maintained a relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] and his related entities from August 2013 until December 2018, taking him on after [[JPMorgan Chase]] dropped him and ending the relationship after renewed press attention to his 2008 plea deal. In July 2020 the New York Department of Financial Services imposed a 150 million dollar penalty for compliance failures centered on the Epstein relationship, and in 2023 the bank agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle a lawsuit by his victims.[^1][^2] + +### Onboarding Epstein in 2013 + +In early 2013 Epstein began moving his assets to Deutsche Bank, brought in by a relationship manager who had previously serviced his accounts at a competitor bank and had joined Deutsche Bank's private wealth department in November 2012.[^1] The relationship manager told senior management that Epstein could generate millions of dollars in revenue and leads for other clients, with one internal email estimating flows of 100 to 300 million dollars over time and revenue of 2 to 4 million dollars annually.[^1] A May 5, 2013 "approval email" from a senior executive reported that the head of anti-money-laundering compliance and the general counsel for the Americas did not think the relationship required reputational-risk review, and the bank's Americas Reputational Risk Committee did not meet on the initial onboarding.[^1] + +The relationship officially began on August 19, 2013, when Deutsche Bank opened brokerage accounts for Southern Trust Company Inc. and Southern Financial LLC, Epstein entities founded in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]].[^1] Over the course of the relationship, Epstein, his entities, and his associates opened and funded more than 40 accounts at the bank.[^1] The bank classified Epstein as "high-risk" and informally designated him an "Honorary PEP," or politically exposed person, because of his connections to prominent political figures.[^1] + +The relationship had been publicly preceded by allegations against Epstein dating to 2005 and by his 2008 guilty plea to a state prostitution charge, after which press reports identified several alleged co-conspirators and described a modeling operation that brought young women, often from Eastern Europe, to the United States.[^1] + +### Suspicious Transactions and Overridden Warnings + +As early as November 1, 2013, Epstein and his representatives used Deutsche Bank accounts to send wires to people who had been alleged to be co-conspirators in his past offenses, including at least 18 wires of 10,000 dollars or more to alleged co-conspirators identified in the consent order as Co-Conspirators 1, 2, and 3.[^1] On January 24, 2014 the bank opened accounts for an Epstein trust named "The Butterfly Trust," whose beneficiaries included those alleged co-conspirators and a number of women with Eastern European surnames; Epstein described the beneficiaries to bank personnel as employees or friends.[^1] Epstein used the Butterfly Trust and other accounts to send more than 120 wires totaling 2.65 million dollars to beneficiaries, for stated purposes such as hotel expenses, tuition, and rent, and made settlement payments to law firms exceeding 7 million dollars and additional legal-expense payments exceeding 6 million dollars.[^1] + +Epstein's personal attorney made a total of 97 cash withdrawals from the bank's Park Avenue branch from 2013 to 2017, typically two to three times a month and each in the amount of 7,500 dollars, the bank's limit for third-party withdrawals, withdrawing in total more than 800,000 dollars on Epstein's behalf.[^1] In May 2014 the attorney asked the bank how often cash could be withdrawn without triggering an alert, and in July 2017 he broke a withdrawal exceeding 10,000 dollars over two days; bank personnel found him credible and let him continue.[^1] In a March 2017 exchange, a member of the transaction-monitoring team responded to an alert about payments to a Russian model and a Russian publicity agent by writing that "since this type of activity is normal for this client it is not deemed suspicious."[^1] + +When the Americas Reputational Risk Committee considered the Epstein relationship at meetings in January 2015, it kept the relationship while imposing conditions, but those conditions were never communicated to all members of the Epstein relationship team or to the transaction-monitoring team, and a compliance officer narrowed the monitoring standard so that little changed.[^1] The consent order found the bank's fundamental failure was that, although it properly classified Epstein as high-risk, it did little to scrutinize, inquire into, or block payments to named co-conspirators and to or on behalf of young women, or to ask why Epstein used on average more than 200,000 dollars per year in cash.[^1] + +### The DFS Penalty and Victim Settlement + +The New York Department of Financial Services issued its consent order on July 6, 2020, finding that Deutsche Bank conducted business in an unsafe and unsound manner in violation of New York Banking Law section 44 and failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program in violation of 3 NYCRR section 116.2.[^1] The order, brought under sections 39 and 44 of the Banking Law, also addressed the bank's correspondent relationships with [[FBME Bank]] and [[Danske Bank]] Estonia, through which it cleared more than 267 billion dollars in transactions and identified hundreds of suspicious transactions.[^1] The order required Deutsche Bank to pay a penalty of 150 million dollars and credited the bank's cooperation and remediation.[^1] + +The bank terminated the Epstein relationship after the [[Miami Herald]] published its November 2018 reporting on his 2008 plea deal, informing Epstein by letter on December 21, 2018 that it would no longer service his accounts.[^1] After the bank decided to offboard the accounts, a relationship manager nonetheless drafted reference letters to two other financial institutions stating that he was "unaware of any problems relating to the operation or use" of the accounts.[^1] + +In May 2023 Deutsche Bank agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle a federal lawsuit in [[New York]] brought by a survivor identified as Jane Doe, who sought class-action status on behalf of other victims and alleged that the bank knowingly benefited from Epstein's sex trafficking and chose profit over compliance with the law.[^2] The plaintiffs were represented by [[Edwards Pottinger]] and [[Boies Schiller Flexner]], and one firm characterized the deal as among the largest sex-trafficking settlements with a bank in U.S. history; a federal judge approved it in October 2023.[^2][^3] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: New York State Department of Financial Services, In the Matter of Deutsche Bank AG, Deutsche Bank AG New York Branch, and Deutsche Bank Trust Company of the Americas, Consent Order Under New York Banking Law sections 39 and 44 (July 6, 2020). https://www.dfs.ny.gov/industry_guidance/enforcement_discipline/ea20200706_deutsche_bank +[^2]: "Deutsche Bank to pay $75 million to Epstein victims in groundbreaking settlement, lawyers say," *PBS NewsHour / Associated Press,* 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/deutsche-bank-to-pay-75-million-to-epstein-victims-in-groundbreaking-settlement-lawyers-say +[^3]: "US judge approves Deutsche Bank $75 million settlement with Epstein accusers," *CNN Business,* 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/business/deutsche-bank-settlement-epstein-accusers diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Dialog.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Dialog.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..329f42f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Dialog.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SecretSociety + - PeterThiel + - SiliconValley + - Elites + - Bilderberg + - Surveillance +alias: + - Dialog Society + - Dialog (organization) +summary: "Dialog is an invitation-only secret society cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats, and whose 2026 retreat roster of 222 registrants was leaked to WIRED in June 2026 by the hacktivist maia arson crimew." +location: "United States (founded); rotating annual retreat sites; planned Washington, D.C.-area campus" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Dialog is an invitation-only network cofounded in 2006 by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]] that convenes U.S. government officials, foreign government figures, and [[Silicon Valley]] executives at off-the-record annual retreats. The organization operated with no public website and a deliberately concealed membership for roughly two decades, drawing comparisons to the [[Bilderberg Group]] and the [[World Economic Forum]] as a transnational elite-gathering institution. In June 2026 a trove of internal records, including the registration list for the 2026 retreat (222 names), was published by the Swiss hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] and separately provided to *WIRED*, which named members including [[Elon Musk]], [[Sam Harris]], [[Jim Himes|Representative Jim Himes]], [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]], [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]], [[Jared Polis|Governor Jared Polis]], [[Jonathan Levin]] (president of [[Stanford University]]), and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe [[Alexus Grynkewich|General Alexus Grynkewich]].[^1] + +The leak exposed the intersection of three networks that are otherwise studied separately: the [[PayPal Mafia]] commercial clique around Thiel, the federal-contracting and intelligence community served by [[Palantir Technologies]], and the consumer-data-brokerage industry built by Hoffman through [[SafeGraph]] and [[LiveRamp]]. Dialog convenes principals from all three networks in a single off-the-record setting, and the 2026 registration list is the first primary record of its attendees. + +### Founding and Format + +Dialog was founded in 2006 by Thiel and Hoffman. Thiel is the cofounder and chairman of Palantir Technologies and the central figure of the PayPal Mafia; Hoffman is the founder of the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. The two structured Dialog as a recurring in-person retreat rather than a conventional industry conference: registrants pay a fee, reported by statistician [[Andrew Gelman]] on his [[Columbia University]] blog *Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science* in April 2022 as exceeding 16,000 U.S. dollars, for access to multi-day gatherings whose proceedings are conducted under off-the-record rules. The fee and the closed-door format distinguish Dialog from industry conferences, which trade attendance for sponsorship and press access.[^1][^2] + +The retreat format mixes panels, small-group discussions, and informal socializing. *WIRED* reported that the 2026 retreat agenda, scheduled for August 12 through 16 at a site near [[Dublin]], included sessions on artificial intelligence disruption, cult-building, sexuality, and preparation for [[World War III]]. The cult-building session sits within a recurring Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics that runs from his book *[[Zero to One]]*, which describes the best startups as "slightly less extreme kinds of cults," through the [[Hereticon]] conference and the [[Rationalist Community]] he funded from 2005.[^1][^8] + +An associated mobile application offers matchmaking functionality among members, routing introductions between registrants. The app extends the in-person retreat into a persistent member network between gatherings, operating as a fee-gated private club with off-the-record rules rather than as an open conference.[^1] + +### Membership and the 2026 Leak + +Dialog maintained its membership list as confidential from founding through 2026. Two separate disclosures broke that posture in June 2026. The hacktivist crimew located a membership directory embedded in the source code of the Dialog website, reflecting the site's access controls, and published a subset of the names. Separately, a source provided *WIRED* with the complete registration list for the 2026 retreat, naming 222 registrants. The two leaks are distinct in mechanism and scope: the website-source disclosure exposed the access-controlled directory, while the registration list exposed a single year's confirmed attendees.[^1] + +The confirmed 2026 registrants, as reported by *WIRED*, spanned U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, media, and the military. Beyond the headline figures, the list included [[Chamath Palihapitiya]] (founder of Social Capital), [[Neal Mohan]] (chief executive of YouTube), [[Peter Attia]] (physician and author of *Outlive*), [[Scott Belsky]] (partner at A24, former chief strategy officer and chief product officer at Adobe), and six members of the PayPal Mafia. *WIRED* additionally identified "sitting [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration officials" and "a former Middle East chief" among the registrants without naming them in the published text.[^1] + +*WIRED* and [[Gizmodo]] drew the explicit Bilderberg comparison on the basis of the roster's breadth: sitting U.S. senators of both parties, an active four-star military commander, sitting technology executives, and venture capital figures. Unlike Bilderberg, Dialog is a privately held U.S. entity with no disclosure obligations, no published attendee list, and no press access. Himes (the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee) and Grynkewich (the NATO SACEUR) appear on the same off-the-record roster as the executives whose firms contract to the agencies Himes oversees and Grynkewich commands.[^1][^3] + +### Prior Outings: The 2013 Invite and the Gelman Post + +Dialog's secrecy was breached twice before the 2026 leak, without producing a comprehensive membership disclosure. In April 2022 the statistician Gelman published a Dialog invitation to his Columbia University blog, describing the registration fee and format; this is the source of the published fee figure of more than 16,000 dollars. Gelman's post was a limited disclosure, naming the event and its cost but not the attendees.[^2] + +Earlier, a 2013 Dialog retreat invitation surfaced in the U.S. Department of Justice document release from the [[Jeffrey Epstein]] files. The invitation had been forwarded to Epstein in November 2012, placing him on the circulation list for a Dialog event, and listed roughly 130 past participants as social proof of the gathering's prestige. The document (indexed as D-23831 in the [[Epstein Files|Epstein document release]]) established that Dialog's historical invitee network overlapped with the Epstein contact network at least a year after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement. Thiel separately met with Epstein in 2014, according to records reviewed by the *New York Times*, and the 2013 invite shows the channel ran through Dialog's own circulation list.[^1][^4][^5] + +### The D.C. Campus + +In August 2025 *Axios* reported that Dialog was preparing a permanent campus in the [[Washington, D.C.]] metropolitan area, with land in [[Northern Virginia]] under purchase. The campus is intended to host Dialog's gatherings on a fixed site rather than the rotating retreat locations used since 2006. The shift converts Dialog from an annual event into a standing physical institution, with the staffing, property records, and local footprint that a permanent site entails.[^6] + +The timing, in the first year of the second Trump administration, placed the expansion adjacent to the federal contracting and intelligence communities that constitute Dialog's government-side membership. *Semafor* confirmed the land acquisition the following day. A fixed campus in Northern Virginia places Dialog physically within the same corridor as the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], the [[National Counterterrorism Center]], the [[Office of the Director of National Intelligence]], and the [[Pentagon]]-adjacent defense-contracting belt that anchors Palantir Technologies' government business.[^6][^7] + +### The Gawker Litigation and Press Suppression + +Between 2007 and 2016 Thiel secretly funded the [[Bollea v. Gawker|Hulk Hogan lawsuit]] against [[Gawker Media]], retaining the lawyer [[Charles Hard]] and covering approximately ten million dollars in litigation costs. The resulting 140 million dollar judgment drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy in 2016. Thiel publicly acknowledged the funding in a *Forbes* interview, framing it as a response to Gawker's 2007 outing of him.[^1] + +Thiel paid the plaintiff's costs through a dedicated litigation vehicle, removing the settlement constraint that normally disciplines plaintiffs' lawyers, with [[Hulk Hogan|Hogan]] as the proxy whose own interests aligned with carrying the litigation to verdict. *WIRED* identified the outcome as a factor in Dialog's low public profile in the years that followed.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: Gelman, Andrew. "Dialog conference." *Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science* (Columbia University blog), April 2022. Referenced via *WIRED*; the original post is no longer available at statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu. +[^3]: "Secretive, Peter Thiel-Founded 'Tech Bilderberg' Group Is Moving Up in the World." *Gizmodo,* August 2025. https://gizmodo.com/secretive-peter-thiel-founded-tech-bilderberg-group-is-moving-up-in-the-world-2000640214 +[^4]: U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein document release. 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein, November 2012. Document D-23831. https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831 +[^5]: "Peter Thiel Is Latest Billionaire Said to Have Met With Jeffrey Epstein." *New York Times,* May 18, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/jeffrey-epstein-peter-thiel.html +[^6]: Fisher, Dan, and Lachlan Markay. "Scoop: Dialog, a secretive forum, plans D.C.-area campus." *Axios,* August 7, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/07/dialog-secret-network-thiel-hoffman +[^7]: "Private club founded by Peter Thiel, Auren Hoffman eyes campus near DC." *Semafor,* August 8, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/article/08/08/2025/private-club-founded-by-peter-thiel-auren-hoffman-eyes-campus-near-dc +[^8]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Edge Foundation.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Edge Foundation.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f5e2c00b --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Edge Foundation.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - EdgeFoundation + - JeffreyEpstein + - SciencePhilanthropy + - ThirdCulture + - BillionairesDinner + - Edge +alias: + - Edge Foundation + - Edge.org + - Edge +summary: "The Edge Foundation is John Brockman's nonprofit that runs Edge.org, hosts the annual Edge Question and Billionaires' Dinner, and drew a majority of its 2001 to 2017 revenue from foundations associated with Jeffrey Epstein." +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Edge Foundation is a New York nonprofit founded by literary agent [[John Brockman]] that operates the website [[Edge.org]], publishes the annual Edge Question, and for years hosted the Billionaires' Dinner. Foundations associated with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] provided $638,000 of nearly $857,000 in revenue the organization received between 2001 and 2017, making Epstein its dominant backer during that period.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the Reality Club + +The Edge Foundation was incorporated in 1988 as an outgrowth of the Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals that Brockman had convened from 1981 to 1996 in restaurants, lofts, and other venues around New York. The foundation describes its mission as promoting inquiry into scientific and intellectual ideas in the spirit of the "third culture" that Brockman set out in his 1995 book *The Third Culture*, in which scientists who write for a general public take the place of the traditional literary intellectual.[^3][^4] + +The third-culture framing extended [[C. P. Snow]]'s 1959 lecture on the divide between literary and scientific cultures, recasting working scientists as the public intellectuals "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives." Brockman ran the site as a program of the foundation alongside his agency [[Brockman Inc.]], with [[Katinka Matson]] listed as co-founder, and many Edge participants were also agency clients whose books the firm sold.[^4][^3] + +Brockman launched Edge.org in 1996 as the online successor to the Reality Club, posting long-form conversations and essays by scientists and authors. The journalist [[John Naughton]] called the site "the world's smartest website" in a 2012 *Observer* profile, a phrase the foundation has since used in its own materials. Contributors over the years included [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Steven Pinker]], [[Daniel Kahneman]], [[Daniel Dennett]], [[Stephen Hawking]], [[Lawrence Krauss]], [[Marvin Minsky]], [[Martin Nowak]], and [[George Church]].[^5][^4] + +### The Edge Question and the World Question Center + +Beginning in 1998, Edge posed an annual question to its contributors through what Brockman called the World Question Center, with prompts including "What is your dangerous idea?," "What will change everything?," and "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The answers were drawn from a contributor pool that one tally put at roughly 80 percent male.[^1][^6] + +The annual responses fed a long-running book series, with collected volumes published as *What We Believe but Cannot Prove*, *What Is Your Dangerous Idea?*, *What Have You Changed Your Mind About?*, *This Will Change Everything*, *This Explains Everything*, and *Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?*, among others. Brockman closed the annual question in 2018 after twenty editions, framing the final question as the finale of the series.[^4][^6] + +The Third Culture program ran in parallel, with Edge publishing the conversations, video, and essays that fed Brockman's edited anthologies and supplied his agency clients with a steady channel to a general readership. The foundation positioned its participants as a continuation of the figures Brockman profiled in *The Third Culture* in 1995.[^4][^3] + +### The Billionaires' Dinner + +Brockman hosted an annual dinner from 1999, timed to the [[TED Conference]], that became known as the Billionaires' Dinner, seating Edge contributors alongside technology and finance figures such as [[Jeff Bezos]], [[Sergey Brin]], and [[Elon Musk]]. Katinka Matson co-organized the events, which Brockman at one point tried to rebrand as "The Science Dinner" before reverting to the original name.[^1][^7] + +Epstein was photographed at the dinners in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004 and attended the 2011 dinner alongside Bezos and Brin; the last dinner was held in March 2015. Photographs from the 2002 and 2003 dinners showed Epstein associate [[Sarah Kellen]] seated with Brockman and his son [[Max Brockman]], and those images were removed from the site after 2019.[^1][^2] + +The Edge Foundation also awarded a $100,000 prize to the quantum-computing physicist [[David Deutsch]] using funds supplied by Epstein, a connection Deutsch said he had been unaware of. He told *BuzzFeed News* that Edge had told him the sponsor's name when he won but that "the name meant nothing to me: I'd never heard of him."[^1] + +### Epstein Funding and the 2019 Reckoning + +The [[Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation]] and other Epstein-controlled entities, including Epstein's Gratitude America and the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, were among the listed funders of the Edge Foundation, and financial records reviewed by *BuzzFeed News* showed those entities provided $638,000 of the roughly $857,000 Edge received from 2001 to 2017. Epstein gave at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011, with no gifts recorded from 2006 to 2008 during his Florida case and imprisonment.[^1][^2] + +Epstein's last recorded contribution was $30,000 in 2015, after which Edge raised only several thousand dollars from a single donor over 2016 and 2017. For multiple years Epstein was effectively the foundation's sole donor, and his withdrawal after 2015 coincided with the end of the dinner series.[^1][^2] + +After Epstein's July 2019 arrest, the science writer [[Carl Zimmer]] asked to be removed from Edge, the author [[Naomi Wolf]] left Brockman Inc. on July 31, 2019, citing both Epstein's funding and the appearance of Sarah Kellen on the site, and [[Evgeny Morozov]] called on Brockman to close the foundation while publishing a 2013 email in which Brockman had tried to introduce him to Epstein. Photographs showing Kellen at Edge dinners were taken down. Most listed contributors did not publicly disassociate from the foundation, and the site continued to host its archived conversations.[^8][^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits," *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the $638,000 of $857,000 figure, the Billionaires' Dinner, the Deutsch prize, the contributor demographics, and the 2019 departures. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation +[^2]: Aldhous, Peter. "How Jeffrey Epstein Bankrolled The Exclusive Edge Foundation And Reaped The Benefits." *BuzzFeed News,* 2019, on the Epstein-linked contributions of $638,000 of nearly $857,000 received 2001 to 2017 and the $30,000 gift in 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation +[^3]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the 1988 incorporation of the Edge Foundation as an outgrowth of the Reality Club. https://www.edge.org/about-edge +[^4]: "About Edge," Edge.org, on the Reality Club's 1981 to 1996 meetings, the third culture, and the 1996 launch. https://www.edge.org/about-edge +[^5]: Naughton, John. "The Man Who Runs The World's Smartest Website," *The Observer,* January 8, 2012. https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_naughton-the-man-who-runs-the-worlds-smartest-website-in-the-observer +[^6]: Brockman, John. *The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.* Simon & Schuster, 1995. +[^7]: "The Edge 'Billionaires' Dinner'" event pages, Edge.org, on the 1999 start of the dinner at the TED conference, the attendee mix, and Brockman's naming of the event. https://www.edge.org/events/edge-dinners +[^8]: "Edge Foundation President May Have Been Jeffrey Epstein's Connection to Intellectual Elite," *InsideHook,* 2019, on the gatekeeper role, the 2013 Morozov email, and the 2019 reckoning. https://www.insidehook.com/culture/edge-foundation-president-may-have-been-jeffrey-epsteins-connection-to-intellectual-elite diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Effective Ventures.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Effective Ventures.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f50143b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Effective Ventures.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - EffectiveVentures + - EffectiveAltruism + - FTX + - Longtermism + - Philanthropy +alias: + - Effective Ventures + - Effective Ventures Foundation + - Effective Ventures US + - EV +summary: "Effective Ventures was the umbrella charity that legally housed the central effective-altruism organizations, took roughly 27 million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in 2022, repaid all of it to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a 2024 settlement, and then resolved to spin out all of its projects into independent bodies." +location: "Oxford, England; United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Effective Ventures was the umbrella organization that served as the legal and operational home of the central institutions of [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]]. It consisted of two affiliated charities, the Effective Ventures Foundation in the United Kingdom and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, which between them hosted projects including the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], [[Giving What We Can]], and the EA Funds. The group received about 27 million dollars from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s [[FTX]] and its associated foundation in 2022, repaid the full amount to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a January 2024 settlement, and subsequently decided to dissolve the umbrella and spin its projects out as independent organizations.[^1][^2] + +### Structure and Projects + +Effective Ventures operated as a fiscal sponsor, a single charitable structure under which a number of distinct projects ran without each having to maintain its own legal entity, board, and back-office functions. The arrangement covered two charities, the Effective Ventures Foundation registered in England and Wales and the separately incorporated Effective Ventures Foundation USA, sharing staff and governance across the Atlantic. The model let the constituent projects share legal, financial, and operational services while presenting themselves publicly under their own names.[^1][^3] + +The projects housed under Effective Ventures included the Centre for Effective Altruism, which runs the movement's conferences and community infrastructure; the career-advising organization 80,000 Hours, cofounded by [[William MacAskill]] and Benjamin Todd; Giving What We Can, the pledge organization for charitable donation also cofounded by MacAskill and [[Toby Ord]]; the grantmaking platform EA Funds; the Forethought Foundation; and at various times other research and outreach efforts. Several of the people who ran Effective Ventures and its projects, including MacAskill, also held roles in Bankman-Fried's philanthropic operation.[^1][^3] + +### The FTX Money and the Settlement + +In 2022 entities within Effective Ventures received approximately 26.8 million dollars in grants from FTX and the FTX Foundation, part of the wave of money Bankman-Fried directed into effective-altruism and longtermist causes before his exchange collapsed in November 2022. When FTX failed and entered bankruptcy, its estate moved to recover money that FTX and Alameda had paid out, including charitable grants, on the basis that the funds had originated in customer deposits misappropriated in the fraud.[^2][^4] + +Effective Ventures announced in January 2024 that it had reached a settlement with the FTX bankruptcy estate under which it returned 26,786,503 dollars, a sum the organization stated was equal to one hundred percent of the funds it and its projects had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation. The repayment, which the group covered in part by drawing on reserves and other donors, removed the threat of clawback litigation but consumed a large share of the organization's resources.[^2][^4] + +### Wytham Abbey + +Among the assets Effective Ventures had acquired in the period of FTX-era abundance was Wytham Abbey, a fifteenth-century manor house near Oxford, bought in 2022 for a reported price of about 15 million pounds to serve as a conference and workshop venue for the effective-altruism community. The purchase, made with funding connected to the movement's major donors, drew public criticism as an extravagant use of charitable money and became a symbol of the movement's spending during its flush years.[^5][^3] + +After the FTX collapse and the settlement, Effective Ventures put the property up for sale, and it was sold in 2024 at a reported loss of about 14.5 million dollars against the purchase and associated costs. The sale was part of the broader unwinding of the organization's holdings and commitments in the wake of the FTX failure.[^5] + +### The Decision to Spin Out + +In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, which implicated people close to the organization and exposed the concentration of legal and reputational risk in a single shared structure, the boards of Effective Ventures UK and Effective Ventures USA decided to spin out all of the group's projects into independent organizations rather than continue as an umbrella. The decision followed an external investigation, commissioned after the collapse, into the organizations' ties to Bankman-Fried.[^1][^6] + +The dissolution proceeded over the following two years. 80,000 Hours announced its plan to become independent in December 2023 and completed its spin-out in May 2025, establishing new United Kingdom entities; the Centre for Effective Altruism announced in January 2024 that it would leave the umbrella and merge with EA Funds, targeting independence by mid-2025. The boards stated that they would not take on new sponsored projects to replace those that departed.[^6][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," Effective Altruism Forum, on the two legal entities, the hosted projects, the settlement, and the decision to spin out all projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev +[^2]: "Effective Ventures Settles $26.8M FTX Donations Case," The Crypto Times, January 31, 2024, on the return of 26,786,503 dollars equal to one hundred percent of the FTX funds received. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/01/31/effective-ventures-settles-26-8m-ftx-donations-case/ +[^3]: "Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum topic page, on the fiscal-sponsor structure and the constituent projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/effective-ventures +[^4]: "Asset Recovery: Effective Ventures Return $27M in Donations to FTX Bankruptcy Estate," Coinfomania, on the clawback context and the recovery of customer-deposit-sourced grants. https://coinfomania.com/asset-recovery-effective-ventures-return-27m-in-donations-to-ftx-bankruptcy-estate/ +[^5]: "FTX-linked Effective Ventures sells UK manor at $14.5M loss," Protos, on the 2022 purchase of Wytham Abbey for about 15 million pounds and its 2024 sale at a reported loss. https://protos.com/ftx-linked-effective-ventures-sells-uk-manor-at-14-5m-loss/ +[^6]: "Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures," Effective Altruism Forum, on the post-FTX investigation and the board decision to spin out the projects. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AuSah98NtR5qv8zQA/reflections-and-lessons-from-effective-ventures-1 +[^7]: "80,000 Hours completes spin-out from Effective Ventures," 80,000 Hours, May 2025, on the December 2023 announcement, the May 2025 completion, and the Centre for Effective Altruism's planned merger with EA Funds. https://80000hours.org/2025/05/80000-hours-completes-spin-out-from-effective-ventures/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Esalen Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Esalen Institute.md index 549e58f6..3af30e5d 100644 --- a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Esalen Institute.md +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Esalen Institute.md @@ -1,50 +1,74 @@ ---- -category: "Research Organization" +--- +category: "Private Organization" tags: - Organization - - California - - Human_Potential + - EsalenInstitute + - HumanPotentialMovement + - Counterculture + - BigSur + - CitizenDiplomacy + - Parapsychology - CIA - FBI - - Soviet_Union - - Cold_War - - Counterculture - - Remote_Viewing -summary: "The Esalen Institute is a California retreat center founded in 1962 at Big Sur whose Soviet-American Exchange Program attracted CIA and FBI monitoring, with both agencies offering founder Michael Murphy recruitment, which he declined." -start: 1962-01-01 + - ColdWar + - RemoteViewing +alias: + - Esalen + - Esalen Institute +summary: "Esalen Institute is the Big Sur retreat center founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price that became the seedbed of the Human Potential movement and whose Soviet-American citizen-diplomacy program drew documented CIA and FBI monitoring." +start: 1962 location: "Big Sur, California" +created: 2026-05-17 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -The Esalen Institute is a retreat center and educational organization founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price at Big Sur on the California coast. It became the principal institutional home of the American human potential movement, hosting seminars, workshops, and residency programs drawing on psychology, Eastern religion, somatic practice, and consciousness research. Its Soviet-American Exchange Program, begun in 1979-1980, created documented interfaces with both American and Soviet intelligence communities.[^1] +Esalen Institute is a residential retreat and education center on the Big Sur coast of California, founded in 1962 by [[Michael Murphy]] and [[Richard Price|Richard "Dick" Price]] to host seminars on what [[Aldous Huxley]] had called "human potentialities." Built on a clifftop property with mineral hot springs that Murphy's family had owned since 1910, it became the principal gathering place of the Human Potential movement and a laboratory for humanistic and transpersonal psychology, Gestalt therapy, encounter groups, bodywork, Eastern meditation, and psychedelic research.[^1][^2] The name comes from the Esselen, the Native people who frequented the springs before European settlement.[^2] -### Soviet-American Exchange Program +### The 1962 Founding -Murphy and his wife Dulce established Esalen's Soviet-American Exchange Program beginning in 1979-1980, framing it as "citizen diplomacy" - informal people-to-people contact intended to reduce Cold War tensions across sectors that formal diplomacy did not easily reach. Program participants over the following decade included American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, academic researchers, business figures, writers, and, within a few years of the program's inception, individuals who had worked for the CIA and the KGB. +The land at Slate's Hot Springs, where the writer Thomas Slate had homesteaded in the 1880s, was bought in 1910 by Dr. Henry Murphy, a Salinas physician and the grandfather of Michael Murphy, who intended to run a health spa there. After California's hot-springs resorts lost their custom and the Big Sur Hot Springs property fell into disuse around 1960, Murphy and Price, two Stanford graduates who had met in 1960 at the American Academy of Asian Studies and the Cultural Integration Fellowship circle in San Francisco, visited the property in 1961 and began planning an educational forum. Both had studied under the [[Stanford University|Stanford]] comparative-religion scholar [[Frederic Spiegelberg]], and both had spent time in Eastern spiritual practice, Murphy at the [[Sri Aurobindo]] Ashram in Pondicherry and Price studying with [[Alan Watts]].[^1][^2] -The operational director of Esalen's Soviet exchanges was Jim Hickman. His policy, and Esalen's institutional policy, was to answer honestly any questions from either American or Soviet intelligence about what the program was doing in the Soviet Union, without volunteering information proactively. Hickman reported that the FBI would appear at various locations worldwide and request polygraph interviews. Both the CIA and KGB initially suspected Esalen of being a front for the other side. +The first program ran in the fall of 1962 under the title "The Human Potentiality," a phrase drawn from Aldous Huxley, who in lectures and writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s had argued that ordinary people use only a fraction of their latent capacities. Alan Watts gave one of the earliest Esalen lectures in January 1962, and [[Abraham Maslow]], the humanistic psychologist whose theories of self-actualization and "peak experience" supplied much of the movement's vocabulary, arrived in the summer of 1962 and became an important patron after stumbling on the place by accident. Esalen incorporated as a nonprofit and published its first catalog in 1963.[^1][^3] -In 1989, Esalen facilitated Boris Yeltsin's first trip to the United States. Murphy and Esalen associates subsequently attributed Yeltsin's embrace of market economics in part to his exposure during this trip.[^1] +### Fritz Perls, Gestalt, and the Encounter Groups + +The German-born psychiatrist [[Fritz Perls]], co-founder of Gestalt therapy, began offering workshops at Esalen in late 1963 and became a permanent resident in 1964, running his confrontational present-moment sessions until he left in 1969. Perls made Esalen the center of the Gestalt revival and worked alongside [[Ida Rolf]], the originator of the deep-tissue bodywork called Rolfing, and [[Moshe Feldenkrais]], whose somatic methods Price championed; Perls and Rolf collaborated on the relation of mind and body.[^4][^5] The phrase "human potential movement" was coined in 1965 by the Look magazine senior editor [[George Leonard]] in conversation with Murphy, after Leonard's 1964 article on education drew heavy reader interest in the term "human potential"; Leonard suggested adding "movement" to name the humanistic current he and Murphy hoped to foster, and he later served as an Esalen president emeritus.[^6] + +The psychologist [[Will Schutz]] arrived in 1967 and made the encounter group, an intense small-group practice aimed at emotional honesty and the breaking down of social masks, synonymous with Esalen; his sessions drew on techniques from Maslow, Huxley, [[Margaret Mead]], Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Alexander Lowen, and Virginia Satir. The anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]], a figure central to [[Cybernetics]] and to the [[Whole Earth Catalog]] milieu through his "ecology of mind," lectured and lived at Esalen in his later years, and the Czech-born psychiatrist [[Stanislav Grof]], a pioneer of [[LSD]] psychotherapy who developed [[Holotropic Breathwork]] after psychedelics were banned, became a scholar-in-residence. [[Joan Baez]] led a folk-music workshop in 1964, and [[Hunter S. Thompson]] worked as a caretaker on the property in the early 1960s.[^4][^5] + +### The Soviet-American Exchange and Track Two + +In the 1970s Murphy grew interested in Soviet [[parapsychology]] and [[telepathy]] research and traveled to the [[Soviet Union|USSR]] to meet its experimenters, contacts that opened a channel between Esalen and Soviet officials. In 1980, with Cold War relations frozen, American figures convened at Esalen and concluded that action beyond official diplomacy was needed, and Murphy, his wife [[Dulce Murphy]], and [[Jim Hickman]] founded the [[Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program]], a form of unofficial "track-two" or citizen diplomacy. The program ran exchanges of astronauts and cosmonauts, scientists, writers, and business figures, and helped produce the first satellite "spacebridges" linking Soviet and American citizens in live televised conversation; within a few years its participants included people who had worked for the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and the [[KGB]].[^7][^8][^10] + +The program invited [[Boris Yeltsin]], then a rising Soviet politician, to make his first visit to the United States in September 1989; Yeltsin arrived in New York on September 9, 1989, toured ten cities, and was reportedly struck by an ordinary Houston supermarket, an episode his biographers describe as deepening his doubts about the Soviet system. The exchange was renamed [[Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy]] in 2004 and continues as an independent organization. Esalen's own histories, and the historian Jeffrey J. Kripal's *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion* (2007), credit the program with contributing to the climate of glasnost and perestroika that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[^7][^8][^10] ### CIA and FBI Monitoring -CIA monitoring of Esalen's Soviet exchange activities is documented by the CIA's possession of a clipping from Newsweek, published January 10, 1983, headlined "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy." The article was prompted by Jim Hickman leading a Human Resources seminar in Moscow, one of the first Esalen-organized exchanges inside the USSR. The CIA document (CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1) is available through the CIA FOIA Reading Room at cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1 and through the Internet Archive. The document is an open-source press clipping filed in classified CIA records, indicating CIA monitoring of the program rather than an analytical intelligence product.[^2] - -The FBI maintained Esalen surveillance files from at least 1978 through 1992. These records, including ELSUR (electronic surveillance) documentation, were released through FOIA requests and are accessible at the FBI Vault (vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute) and the Internet Archive.[^2] - -Murphy has stated publicly that both the CIA and FBI actively recruited him and that he declined both approaches: "I never succumbed."[^1] +The Soviet exchanges drew the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides. Hickman, the program's operational director, said his policy was to answer honestly any questions from American or Soviet intelligence about the program's activities in the Soviet Union without volunteering information, and he reported that the FBI would appear at locations worldwide to request polygraph interviews; both the CIA and the KGB initially suspected Esalen of being a front for the other side. CIA monitoring is documented by the agency's retention of a January 10, 1983 *Newsweek* clipping headlined "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy," filed in its records as document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1, and the FBI maintained Esalen surveillance files, including electronic-surveillance records, from at least 1978 through 1992, released through the FBI Vault. Murphy has said that both the CIA and the FBI tried to recruit him and that he declined, telling an interviewer "I never succumbed."[^10][^11] ### Intelligence Community Overlap: Kit Green and SRI -The intelligence community's interest in Esalen extended beyond its Soviet exchange activities to include the organization's broader connections to the human potential and consciousness research community. Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, a CIA neurophysiologist (Ph.D. 1969, M.D. 1976) who joined the CIA in 1969 and rose to Deputy Division Director for Life Sciences, was the CIA's principal liaison to the [[Stanford Research Institute]] remote viewing program from its inception in 1972. On June 27, 1972, Hal Puthoff wrote to Green, then occupying the "Life Science Desk" in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, about Ingo Swann's magnetometer experiment at SRI; this initiated the CIA's covert funding of what eventually became a 22-year, $19.993 million remote viewing research program.[^3] +The intelligence community's interest in the California consciousness-research milieu extended to the overlap between Esalen's human-potential circle and the remote-viewing program at the [[Stanford Research Institute]]. Christopher "Kit" Green, a CIA neurophysiologist who joined the agency in 1969 and rose to Deputy Division Director for Life Sciences, was the CIA's principal liaison to the SRI remote-viewing program from its inception in 1972. On June 27, 1972, [[Hal Puthoff]] wrote to Green, then at the "Life Science Desk" in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, about [[Ingo Swann]]'s magnetometer experiment at SRI, a letter that initiated the agency's covert funding of what became a 22-year, roughly 20-million-dollar remote-viewing research program.[^12] -Esalen's human potential research community and the SRI remote viewing program overlapped through shared figures and shared intellectual culture in the California consciousness research milieu of the 1970s; several individuals moved between both institutions. Green received the CIA's National Intelligence Medal for classified work in the period 1979-1983. Whether that work was institutionally connected to Esalen's program specifically, as distinct from the SRI remote viewing research with which he was documented to be involved, is not established in available public records.[^3] +Esalen's human-potential research community and the SRI remote-viewing program overlapped through shared figures and a shared intellectual culture, and several individuals moved between the two. Green received the CIA's National Intelligence Medal for classified work in the period 1979 to 1983, though whether that work was institutionally connected to Esalen specifically, as distinct from the SRI research with which he was documented to be involved, is not established in public records.[^12] -### Academic Treatment +### The Courtship of Silicon Valley -Jeffrey J. Kripal's "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion" (University of Chicago Press, 2007) is the principal scholarly treatment of Esalen's history, placing its Cold War activities within a broader intellectual and spiritual history. Kripal documents Esalen's Soviet exchange program and CIA adjacency as part of what he characterizes as Esalen's role at the intersection of "Cold War espionage" and "ecstatic religiosity."[^1] +By the 2010s the center, long known as a "hippie hotel," had turned toward the wealth of the nearby San Francisco Bay Area technology industry. Under a new generation of leaders, including the former Google product manager [[Ben Tauber]], who became chief executive in 2017, Esalen began inviting ethicists, futurists, and technologists to retreats addressing the moral quandaries of the people building consumer technology, drawing executives and engineers from companies such as Google and Facebook. Press coverage of the period described the institute marketing its programs on personal transformation to a Silicon Valley clientele anxious about the social effects of the products it was shipping.[^9] + +Gregory Bateson had spent his last years lecturing and living at Esalen, and his cybernetic "ecology of mind" had also shaped [[Stewart Brand]], who published Bateson in the *Whole Earth Catalog* he launched in 1968 and in the WELL online community he later cofounded. Esalen's later programming on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the psychology of technology was reported by outlets including The New York Times and Quartz.[^9] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Kripal, Jeffrey J. *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion*. University of Chicago Press, 2007. "Hot Tub Diplomacy: How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War." Atlas Obscura. atlasobscura.com. -[^2]: CIA FOIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1. cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1. Also: Internet Archive, archive.org/details/CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1. FBI Vault, Esalen Institute files. vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute. -[^3]: Puthoff, Hal. "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute." Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996. Green, Christopher. NCBI Biographical Sketch, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207949/. +[^1]: "About Esalen: History, Mission, Vision, and Leadership," Esalen Institute, on the 1962 founding by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, the inspiration of Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, Murphy's year and a half at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, Price's study with Alan Watts, and the land's stewardship with the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County. https://www.esalen.org/about +[^2]: Harper, Steven K. "A History of Esalen Institute," on the Esselen people, Thomas Slate's 1880s homestead at Slate's Hot Springs, Dr. Henry Murphy's 1910 purchase, the 1937 completion of Highway 1 and the Big Sur Hot Springs resort, Murphy and Price at Stanford, Alan Watts's January 1962 lecture, Maslow's summer 1962 visit, Gia-fu Feng, and Fritz Perls. https://www.stevenkharper.com/ahistoryofesaleninstitute.html +[^3]: "Abraham Maslow," Esalen Origin Stories, on Maslow's self-actualization and peak experience and his patronage of Esalen; and on Huxley's lectures on "human potentialities" as the source of the first 1962 seminar series. https://www.esalen.org/origin/maslow +[^4]: "Fritz Perls," on Perls's affiliation with Esalen from 1964, his development of Gestalt therapy as resident pioneer, and his collaboration with Ida Rolf on mind and body; with Stanislav Grof and Gregory Bateson as Esalen figures. Standard reference accounts of Perls's Esalen residency, 1964 to 1969. +[^5]: "Will Schutz, In Memoriam," Esalen, on Schutz's 1967 arrival, his making encounter groups synonymous with Esalen, and his drawing on Maslow, Huxley, Mead, Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Lowen, and Satir. https://www.esalen.org/in-memoriam/will-schutz +[^6]: "George Leonard," Esalen Origin Stories, on Leonard as Look magazine senior editor, his 1964 article on education using "human potential," and the 1965 coinage of "human potential movement" in conversation with Michael Murphy. https://www.esalen.org/origin/george-leonard +[^7]: "Forty Years Later, Track Two Continues to Expand its Global Reach," Esalen Journal, on the 1980 convening at Esalen, the founding of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program by Michael and Dulce Murphy and Jim Hickman, the spacebridges, the 1989 Yeltsin invitation, and the 2004 renaming to Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy. https://www.esalen.org/post/forty-years-later-track-two-continues-to-expand-its-global-reach +[^8]: "1989 visit by Boris Yeltsin to the United States," on Yeltsin's arrival in New York on September 9, 1989, his tour of ten cities, and the Houston supermarket episode; and "Michael Murphy Helped Launch Human Potential Movement More Than 40 Years Ago," Voice of America, on Murphy's 1970s interest in Soviet parapsychology and the resulting exchange. https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2008-04-22-voa27/345326.html +[^9]: "The philosophy that could have stopped Silicon Valley's crisis of conscience before it started," Quartz, on Silicon Valley executives from companies such as Google and Facebook attending Esalen and the leadership's invitation of ethicists and futurists; and reporting on the former Google executive Ben Tauber becoming Esalen's chief executive in 2017. https://qz.com/1161704 +[^10]: Kripal, Jeffrey J. *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.* University of Chicago Press, 2007; and "Hot Tub Diplomacy: How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War," Atlas Obscura, on the Soviet-American exchange, the CIA and KGB interest, and the Cold War framing. +[^11]: CIA FOIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1, the January 10, 1983 *Newsweek* "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy" clipping retained in CIA records, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-00806r000100380026-1 ; and the FBI Vault, Esalen Institute files, surveillance records from 1978 to 1992, https://vault.fbi.gov/esalen-institute +[^12]: Puthoff, Harold. "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute," *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996; and Christopher Green, NCBI biographical sketch, on the June 27, 1972 Puthoff letter to Green, Green's CIA liaison role to the SRI program, and his National Intelligence Medal. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207949/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/FTX Future Fund.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/FTX Future Fund.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..190bcf98 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/FTX Future Fund.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - FTXFutureFund + - SamBankmanFried + - FTX + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - NickBeckstead +summary: "The FTX Future Fund was the philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX Foundation, run by Nick Beckstead with Will MacAskill and others, which committed roughly $160 million to longtermist, AI-safety, and biosecurity causes before its entire team resigned and the money was clawed back when FTX collapsed in November 2022." +location: "San Francisco, California; Nassau, Bahamas" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The FTX Future Fund was a philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by the FTX Foundation, the charitable arm of the cryptocurrency empire of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]. Run by [[Nick Beckstead]] with the philosopher [[William MacAskill]] and a small team, it became the flashiest and most aggressive funder of [[Longtermism|longtermist]], AI-safety, and biosecurity work within the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, committing roughly 160 million dollars in its nine months of operation before its entire leadership resigned and the fund collapsed alongside [[FTX]] in November 2022. The money was traced to defrauded FTX customers, and the bankruptcy estate later pursued grantees to claw it back.[^1][^2] + +### The February 2022 Launch + +The Future Fund was announced in late February 2022 with a declared ambition far larger than its eventual spending: it said it planned to distribute at least 100 million dollars in 2022 and might deploy up to 1 billion dollars that year, drawing on the fortune Bankman-Fried had built at FTX and the trading firm [[Alameda Research]]. Its stated areas of interest were the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biological risk, improving institutions, economic growth, great-power relations, and effective altruism itself, an explicitly longtermist agenda focused on improving humanity's long-run prospects. The fund's leadership came directly from the movement's intellectual core: Beckstead, a philosopher who had run the long-term-future grantmaking at Open Philanthropy, served as chief executive, and the team included MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher who had cofounded the movement and personally recruited Bankman-Fried into "earning to give," along with [[Leopold Aschenbrenner]], [[Avital Balwit]], and [[Ketan Ramakrishnan]].[^1][^3] + +The fund operated through three mechanisms: an open call for applications, staff-led grants drawn from a longlist of priorities, and a regranting program that gave discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. The regranting program was the fund's signature innovation, onboarding more than 100 regrantors with their own budgets plus more than 50 grant recommenders, and the fund set aside more than 100 million dollars for them to deploy over a six-month experiment running from April to October 2022. This structure pushed money out at unusual speed and with unusual decentralization compared with the deliberative pace of [[Good Ventures]] and Open Philanthropy.[^3][^4] + +### The Regranting Program and the Money + +By its June 2022 public update the Future Fund reported making 262 grants and investments totaling approximately 132 million dollars. Of that, staff-led grantmaking accounted for about 73 million dollars across 25 grants, the open call had drawn more than 1,700 applications of which 69 were funded for about 26 million dollars, and the regranting program had deployed about 31 million dollars across 168 grants. Broken down by cause, effective altruism had received about 34 million dollars across 61 grants, biorisk about 30 million across 30 grants, artificial intelligence about 20 million across 76 grants, and a program to recruit exceptional people about 10 million across 18 grants. The largest 41 grants, each above 500,000 dollars, accounted for about 109 million dollars of the total.[^4] + +Over its full run the fund committed on the order of 160 million dollars, well short of the 100-million-to-1-billion ambition it had announced but still a sum that flooded the longtermist and AI-safety field, where many organizations had previously depended on the slower Good Ventures money. Recipients spanned AI-safety research groups, biosecurity projects, academic fellowships, media and recruitment efforts, and forecasting work, and the speed of the deployment meant that by the time FTX failed a large share of the committed money had been paid out and in some cases already spent.[^1][^4] + +### The November 2022 Collapse + +On November 11, 2022, the same day FTX filed for bankruptcy, the Future Fund's entire team announced its resignation in a post on the EA Forum. Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, and Ramakrishnan signed the statement, joined by MacAskill, writing that they were devastated that many committed grants could not be honored, that their hearts went out to the thousands of FTX customers whose finances had been jeopardized or destroyed, and that to the extent FTX leadership had engaged in deception or dishonesty they condemned it in the strongest possible terms. They said they were unable to perform their work or process grants and directed grantees to a reachout address. Bankman-Fried was later convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023 after FTX collapsed with billions of dollars in customer funds missing.[^2][^5] + +The collapse left grantees in legal and financial limbo, because the money had originated with an entity now revealed to have been insolvent and, on the government's case, funded by misappropriated customer deposits. A March 2023 *TIME* investigation reported that effective-altruism leaders had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct years before the failure, fueling the charge that the movement's consequentialist reasoning had helped rationalize his behavior.[^6][^7] + +### The Clawbacks + +The FTX bankruptcy estate, represented by the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, moved to recover money transferred before the bankruptcy under preference and fraudulent-conveyance theories, which reach transactions made up to two years before the filing even when the recipient did nothing wrong and had no knowledge of wrongdoing. Future Fund grantees received demand letters seeking repayment, and many returned funds or negotiated settlements rather than litigate in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The episode meant that money the field had treated as a windfall in 2022 became a liability that recipients could be ordered to give back.[^8][^9] + +The largest single settlement involved [[Effective Ventures]], the umbrella charity housing the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], and [[Giving What We Can]], which agreed on December 13, 2023 to pay the FTX estate 26,786,503 dollars, an amount equal to 100 percent of the funds its entities had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation in 2022. An independent investigation by the law firm Mintz found no evidence that anyone at Effective Ventures had known of the criminal fraud, and the organization went on to spin its constituent projects out as independent legal entities. Open Philanthropy separately invited grantees harmed by the FTX collapse to apply for replacement funding, partially backfilling commitments the Future Fund could no longer keep.[^10][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Announcing the Future Fund," reposted at Marginal Revolution, February-March 2022, on the February 2022 launch, the goal of distributing at least 100 million dollars in 2022 and potentially up to 1 billion, the areas of interest, Beckstead as chief executive, and the team. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/announcing-the-future-fund.html +[^2]: "The FTX Future Fund team has resigned," EA Forum, November 11, 2022, on the resignation of Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, Ramakrishnan, and MacAskill and their statement about FTX customers and grant commitments. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1 +[^3]: "Future Fund," EA Forum topic entry, on the launch, the team (Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, MacAskill, Ramakrishnan), and the regranting program. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/future-fund +[^4]: "Future Fund June 2022 Update," EA Forum, on the 262 grants totaling approximately 132 million dollars, the regranting program (more than 100 regrantors, more than 100 million dollars set aside, 31 million deployed across 168 grants), the open call (more than 1,700 applications, 69 funded for 26 million), staff-led grants (25 grants, 73 million), and the cause breakdowns. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/paMYXYFYbbjpdjgbt/future-fund-june-2022-update +[^5]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, November 2, 2023. +[^6]: "FTX Foundation Shutters Effective Altruism Fund as Key Execs Resign," Decrypt, November 2022, on the resignation and the fund's grantmaking. https://decrypt.co/114197/ftx-foundation-shutters-effective-altruism-fund-key-execs-resign +[^7]: "Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed," *TIME,* March 2023. https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ +[^8]: "Claw-Back Litigation in FTX Bankruptcy FAQs," Morris James LLP, on the preference and fraudulent-conveyance mechanisms, the two-year reach, and the demand-letter-then-complaint process in the District of Delaware. https://www.morrisjames.com/p/102j9xu/claw-back-litigation-in-ftx-bankruptcy-faqs/ +[^9]: "Clawbacks: Probably don't spend FTX grantee money for the next few days(?)," EA Forum, on grantees facing demands to return Future Fund money. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Bq3PFRfzaEEAATti/clawbacks-probably-don-t-spend-ftx-grantee-money-for-the +[^10]: "EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV," EA Forum, on the December 13, 2023 Effective Ventures settlement of 26,786,503 dollars equal to 100 percent of funds received from FTX and the FTX Foundation in 2022, the Mintz investigation, and the spinning out of CEA, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev +[^11]: "Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events," EA Forum, November 2022, on Open Philanthropy inviting FTX-affected grantees to apply for replacement funding. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HPdWWetJbv4z8eJEe/open-phil-is-seeking-applications-from-grantees-impacted-by diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Founders Fund.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Founders Fund.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a5439f69 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Founders Fund.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - FoundersFund + - VentureCapital + - PeterThiel + - PayPalMafia + - SiliconValley +alias: + - Founders Fund Management LLC +summary: "Founders Fund is a San Francisco venture capital firm founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, whose early investments in Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries made it the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Founders Fund is a [[San Francisco]] venture capital firm founded in 2005 by [[Peter Thiel]], [[Ken Howery]], and [[Luke Nosek]], all of them [[PayPal Mafia]] principals. The firm's early investments included [[Facebook]] (Thiel's 2004 angel investment of 500,000 dollars was the firm's first major deal and produced a roughly two billion dollar return), [[SpaceX]], [[Palantir Technologies]], [[Airbnb]], [[Stripe]], and [[Anduril Industries]]. The firm has functioned as the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network: it concentrates capital in firms pursuing monopoly positions in domains (payments, defense, space, biotechnology, sovereign-grade infrastructure) the firm judges foundational.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the PayPal Mafia Origin + +Thiel founded Founders Fund in 2005 with Howery and Nosek, both of them PayPal cofounders, after the 2002 PayPal sale to [[eBay]]. The PayPal Mafia lineage shaped the firm's strategy and its deal flow: the firm's early portfolio drew on the personal networks of the PayPal cohort, and the PayPal anti-fraud data architecture transferred into the Palantir Technologies thesis the firm seeded the same year. Howery served as the firm's first managing partner and later as U.S. Ambassador to [[Sweden]] under the first [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration; Nosek remains a partner and sits on the SpaceX board.[^1] + +The firm operates with a smaller headcount than its peers and has historically kept a flat partner structure. [[Brian Singerman]], [[Trae Stephens]], [[Keith Rabois]], and [[Delian Asparouhov]] have been among the partners whose deals extended the firm's reach into defense, health, and frontier-technology investing. The partner network overlaps with the Dialog convening network the same cofounders run: the firm's principals and its portfolio-company founders are the population from which Dialog's technology-side membership is drawn.[^1][^3] + +### The Zero to One Thesis + +The firm's investment thesis is set out in the 2014 book *[[Zero to One|Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future]]*, coauthored by Thiel and [[Blake Masters]]. The book argues that competition is for losers and that durable value comes from building monopolies around proprietary technology, and it licenses the firm's preference for capital-intensive, defensibility-focused bets in domains that traditional venture capital had avoided. The thesis rejects the conventional venture preference for consumer-internet distribution deals in favor of bets on firms that can establish structural dominance in a foundational category.[^2] + +The thesis has produced concentrated bets. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in SpaceX (2008), took an early position in Palantir Technologies alongside the In-Q-Tel seed, led the early rounds of Anduril Industries beginning in 2017, and has built a substantial defense-and-sovereign-infrastructure portfolio across Clearview AI, Anduril, and adjacent firms. The defense-tech concentration is the commercial counterpart to the [[Neoreaction]] thesis that state capacity should be privatized and concentrated in private firms.[^1][^2] + +### Notable Investments and Returns + +The Facebook investment is the firm's best-known outcome. Thiel's 2004 angel investment of 500,000 dollars acquired approximately 10 percent of the company; the firm and Thiel sold the majority of the position across the 2012 IPO and the following years, with the realized return in the range of two billion dollars. The SpaceX position, held since 2008, remains the firm's largest unrealized holding as the company's valuation has risen through successive private rounds. Palantir Technologies, Airbnb, and Stripe each produced billion-dollar-plus outcomes.[^1] + +The defense and frontier-tech portfolio is the more recent concentration. Anduril Industries, backed by Founders Fund from 2017 and led by partner Stephens, reached a 30.5 billion dollar valuation in the 2025 Series G that Founders Fund led with a reported one billion dollar check. Clearview AI, the facial-recognition firm, took Thiel-network investment. The firm has also built positions in [[Epic Games]], [[Affirm]], and in [[bitcoin]] (the firm took an early institutional position and disclosed holdings in 2020).[^1][^4] + +### The Defense-Tech and Sovereign-Infrastructure Concentration + +Founders Fund's portfolio has shifted toward defense, sovereign-grade infrastructure, and firms whose products are procured by or substitute for state functions. The concentration includes Palantir Technologies (intelligence and law-enforcement data fusion), Anduril Industries (autonomous defense systems), Clearview AI (facial recognition), and adjacent positions in surveillance, identity, and payments infrastructure. The firm's published investment theses, including the 2014 [[Founders Fund Manifesto]] that criticized the consumer-internet focus of the prior venture generation, frame the shift as a return to the "atoms not bits" argument that capital should flow into physical and infrastructure technology rather than into consumer software.[^1][^2] + +The portfolio concentration aligns the firm's commercial interests with the [[Dialog]] convening network's government-side membership. Portfolio companies in defense, data fusion, and surveillance categories sell to the intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies whose congressional oversight and military-command principals attend Dialog. The firm is the investment vehicle; Dialog is the convening vehicle; the portfolio's clients are the government principals who appear on the Dialog roster.[^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Founders Fund's portfolio, partners, and investment history, see the firm's own published materials at foundersfund.com and the corporate filings of its portfolio companies. +[^2]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. The "competition is for losers" formulation and the monopoly thesis are set out in Chapter 3. +[^3]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^4]: "Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund." *NBC New York* (via Bloomberg), 2025. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/anduril-raises-funding-at-30-5-billion-valuation-in-round-led-by-founders-fund-chairman-says/6291304/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Humanity Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Humanity Institute.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..945d0daf --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Humanity Institute.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - FutureOfHumanityInstitute + - Longtermism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - Transhumanism + - Oxford +alias: + - FHI +summary: "The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024." +location: "Oxford, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was a multidisciplinary research center at the [[University of Oxford]], founded in 2005 by the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] and closed by the university on April 16, 2024. For nearly two decades it was the academic headquarters of [[Longtermism|longtermism]] and of the study of existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential. Its personnel and arguments seeded the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and its work on artificial-intelligence risk reinforced the doom thesis that runs through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the AI-safety organizations [[Peter Thiel]] funded.[^1][^2] + +### Research and Personnel + +FHI sat within Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School and worked on existential risk, AI safety, human enhancement, global catastrophic risk, and the anthropic reasoning Bostrom had formalized. Its researchers overlapped almost entirely with the founding figures of effective altruism: [[Toby Ord]], who founded [[Giving What We Can]], and [[William MacAskill]], who later wrote the longtermist book *What We Owe the Future*, were associated with the institute and the adjacent Oxford effective-altruism organizations, and the futurist [[Anders Sandberg]] was a long-serving senior fellow. The institute functioned as the scholarly counterpart to the Bay Area rationalist scene around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]].[^1][^3] + +The institute was established in 2005 on a three-year initial term and ran for nineteen years. Its output included Bostrom's *Superintelligence* and the formalization of "existential risk," Ord's 2020 book *The Precipice*, and influential papers on the "unilateralist's curse," the "vulnerable world hypothesis," and the simulation argument, alongside early technical AI-governance work that fed the policy conversation later taken up by the [[Future of Life Institute]] and government bodies. The historian of the milieu noted that FHI operated less as a conventional department than as a research collective of philosophers, mathematicians, and computer scientists working on questions most academic institutions regarded as speculative.[^6] + +### Funding + +FHI drew support from technology philanthropy aligned with its longtermist mission. [[Elon Musk]], whom Bostrom's *Superintelligence* had influenced, funded AI-safety work in the institute's orbit, and the institute and its affiliated projects received money from [[Open Philanthropy]] and, before its 2022 collapse, the [[FTX Future Fund]] established by [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]. The funding tied Oxford academic longtermism to the same donor base that capitalized the effective-altruism and AI-safety infrastructure.[^2][^4] + +The reliance on a small number of mission-aligned donors became a structural problem once Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy froze the institute's fundraising in 2020, leaving it unable to bring in new money or replace departing staff. The collapse of the FTX Future Fund in November 2022, when Bankman-Fried's exchange failed and the fund's grant commitments evaporated, cut off a major prospective source for longtermist research across the field and deepened the reputational crisis that surrounded the institute in its final eighteen months. The institute's dependence on the effective-altruism donor base meant its fortunes tracked that movement's standing rather than ordinary university funding cycles.[^4][^6] + +### Closure + +The institute shut down on April 16, 2024, after years of administrative conflict with the Oxford philosophy faculty, including a freeze on hiring and fundraising. Bostrom left the university. The closure followed the reputational damage of Bostrom's 2023 admission of a 1990s racist email and the wider discrediting of effective altruism after the [[FTX]] fraud, and it removed longtermism's principal academic institution at the moment the movement was under its heaviest public scrutiny.[^5] + +The institute's website was replaced on the closure date by a four-paragraph statement attributing the shutdown to "increasing administrative headwinds" from the Faculty of Philosophy. The Faculty had decided in late 2023 not to renew the contracts of the remaining staff, and Bostrom described the outcome to *The Guardian* as a "death by bureaucracy." Bostrom founded a successor organization, the nonprofit Macrostrategy Research Initiative, to continue the work outside Oxford. Several former staff dispersed to other existential-risk bodies, including the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]] at Cambridge and independent AI-governance groups, but no institution replaced FHI's role as the field's academic center.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014, and the Future of Humanity Institute research record, 2005 to 2024. +[^2]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo +[^3]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism +[^4]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/ +[^5]: "The future of the future of humanity," Émile P. Torres, on the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute, 2024. https://xriskology.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-future-of-humanity +[^6]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the institute's 2005 founding, nineteen-year run, research output, the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision, the April 16, 2024 closure statement, and the "death by bureaucracy" account; Bostrom subsequently founded the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Life Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Life Institute.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ac78d82e --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Future of Life Institute.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - FutureOfLifeInstitute + - ArtificialIntelligence + - ExistentialRisk + - EffectiveAltruism + - ElonMusk +alias: + - FLI +summary: "The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit founded in 2014 by Max Tegmark and others to address existential risks from advanced technology, funded with an early ten million dollar gift from Elon Musk, that published the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments." +location: "Cambridge, Massachusetts" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization founded in March 2014 by the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] physicist [[Max Tegmark]], the Estonian programmer [[Jaan Tallinn]], and the researchers [[Viktoriya Krakovna]], [[Anthony Aguirre]], and [[Meia Chita-Tegmark]], to steer transformative technologies away from large-scale risks to humanity. It is one of the principal organizations of the artificial-intelligence existential-risk movement, alongside the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], and it shares the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] donor base and worldview.[^1][^2] + +### Musk Funding and Early Work + +[[Elon Musk]], who had been influenced by [[Nick Bostrom]]'s warnings about superintelligence, donated ten million dollars to the institute in January 2015, money that funded about seven million dollars in research grants on AI safety. The institute's first conference, held in [[Puerto Rico]] from January 2 to 5, 2015, gathered AI researchers with economists, lawyers, and ethicists to set priorities for "robust and beneficial" AI; in July 2015 FLI announced grants of nearly seven million dollars to 37 research teams from the Musk gift. The January 2017 Asilomar conference produced the 23 "Asilomar AI Principles" on research goals, ethics, and longer-term risks, an early and widely cited governance framework.[^2][^6] + +Tallinn, a cofounder of [[Skype]] and a major funder of the rationalist and AI-risk ecosystem, sits among its backers. In May 2021 the Ethereum cofounder [[Vitalik Buterin]] gave the institute a cryptocurrency donation later disclosed in an EU transparency filing as worth roughly 665 million dollars, much of it in Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens; the institute cashed out about 500 million dollars, far more than Buterin said he had expected given the token's liquidity. Buterin subsequently distanced himself from FLI, saying its later turn toward "cultural and political action" risked authoritarian outcomes and could be used to restrict open-source AI.[^3][^7] + +### The 2023 Pause Letter + +In March 2023 the institute published "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter," calling on all AI labs to halt for at least six months the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing risks of AI-generated propaganda, mass job automation, human obsolescence, and a loss of societal control. The letter gathered more than thirty thousand signatures, including Musk, the Apple cofounder [[Steve Wozniak]], the historian [[Yuval Noah Harari]], and the AI researchers [[Yoshua Bengio]] and [[Stuart Russell]]. No pause occurred; the AI companies instead expanded their training infrastructure, and the letter became the most prominent public expression of the AI-doom position associated with [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] and the longtermist movement.[^4][^5] + +Yudkowsky himself declined to sign and published his "Shut it all down" essay in *Time* days later arguing the letter asked for far too little. The early signatory list also drew scrutiny when several names were revealed to be impersonations the institute had not verified, including fake signatures attributed to [[Sam Altman]], Meta chief AI scientist [[Yann LeCun]], and Chinese president [[Xi Jinping]], which FLI removed after tightening its vetting; critics also noted that some genuine signatories led companies positioned to benefit from a pause that slowed competitors. The letter nonetheless shaped the 2023 policy debate, feeding into the United Kingdom's November 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and the wider governmental turn toward frontier-AI oversight.[^4][^9] + +### The Nya Dagbladet Grant Controversy + +In January 2023 the Swedish anti-racist foundation [[Expo (foundation)|Expo]] reported that FLI, through Tegmark, had offered a 100,000 dollar grant to the foundation behind Nya Dagbladet, a Swedish outlet that had published far-right and racist conspiracy content. Tegmark's brother had connections to the Swedish alternative-media scene, which drew further attention to the episode.[^8] + +FLI said it had offered the grant before completing due diligence, became aware of the outlet's "right-wing extremist" affiliations during that process roughly three months later, and immediately revoked the offer, and it stated that the foundation had received no funding and would receive none. The institute published a statement on the rejected proposal in response to the reporting. The controversy sharpened existing concerns about the opacity of FLI's grantmaking and the politics of its expanding cryptocurrency-funded budget.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on the founding and the grants program. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/ +[^2]: "How Elon Musk is trying to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humanity," *Malay Mail* / Associated Press, July 2, 2015, on the ten million dollar Musk donation. https://www.malaymail.com/news/tech/gadgets/2015/07/02/how-elon-musk-is-trying-to-make-sure-ai-doesnt-wipe-out-humanity/925841 +[^3]: "Elon Musk-Backed Non-Profit Offered $100K Grant to 'Pro-Nazi' Media Outlet," *Vice,* on the institute's funding and a later grant controversy. https://www.vice.com/en/article/future-of-life-institute-max-tegmark-elon-musk/ +[^4]: Future of Life Institute. "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter," March 2023. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ +[^5]: "FAQs about FLI's Open Letter Calling for a Pause on Giant AI Experiments," Future of Life Institute, 2023, and the one-year-later assessment. https://futureoflife.org/ai/faqs-about-flis-open-letter-calling-for-a-pause-on-giant-ai-experiments/ +[^6]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on the January 2015 Puerto Rico conference, the July 2015 grants of nearly seven million dollars to 37 teams, and the 2017 Asilomar AI Principles. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/ +[^7]: "Future of Life Institute received $665 million in crypto," Philanthropy News Digest, on the May 2021 Vitalik Buterin SHIB donation disclosed in a 2023 EU filing, and "Vitalik Buterin questions political pivot by AI safety group that cashed out roughly $500M from his SHIB donation," *The Block.* https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/future-of-life-institute-received-undisclosed-665-million-in-crypto +[^8]: "Elon Musk-Backed Non-Profit Offered $100K Grant to 'Pro-Nazi' Media Outlet," *Vice,* 2023, and "Statement on a controversial rejected grant proposal," Future of Life Institute, 2023, on the offered and revoked Nya Dagbladet grant. https://futureoflife.org/rejection_statement/ +[^9]: "The Open Letter to Stop 'Dangerous' AI Race Is a Huge Mess," *Vice,* 2023, on the fake signatures attributed to Sam Altman, Yann LeCun, and Xi Jinping and the institute's tightened vetting. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-open-letter-to-stop-dangerous-ai-race-is-a-huge-mess/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/GiveWell.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/GiveWell.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d4f422eb --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/GiveWell.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - GiveWell + - HoldenKarnofsky + - ElieHassenfeld + - EffectiveAltruism + - BridgewaterAssociates + - Philanthropy +alias: + - The Clear Fund +summary: "GiveWell is a charity evaluator founded in 2007 by former Bridgewater Associates analysts Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, whose cost-effectiveness rankings of global-health charities and whose GiveWell Labs project, funded by Good Ventures, became Open Philanthropy." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +GiveWell is a nonprofit charity evaluator founded in 2007 by [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Elie Hassenfeld]], two former hedge-fund analysts at [[Bridgewater Associates]], that ranks charities by cost-effectiveness and directs donors toward a short list of proven global-health interventions. Its research methodology and its incubated "GiveWell Labs" project, bankrolled by the [[Good Ventures]] foundation of [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and [[Cari Tuna]], produced [[Open Philanthropy]], and GiveWell became one of the foundational institutions of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement.[^1][^2] + +### The 2007 Founding + +Karnofsky and Hassenfeld met as investment analysts at Bridgewater Associates, the [[Connecticut]] firm run by [[Ray Dalio]] that is the world's largest hedge fund. In 2006 they formed an informal group of eight colleagues to research where they could give charitably with the most measurable impact, applying the data-driven, transparency-oriented analysis they used in finance and finding that charities published little evidence of results. In 2007 Karnofsky and Hassenfeld left their jobs, raised about 300,000 dollars in startup funds from former coworkers, and incorporated the organization, originally called The Clear Fund, publishing their first business plan, "The Case for the Clear Fund," on April 7, 2007.[^1][^3] + +The new organization's defining premise was that information about how to help people should never be secret and that cost-effectiveness, the dollars required to achieve a given amount of good, should be published openly so that ordinary donors could direct their money toward the most effective programs. GiveWell tracked just over 30,000 dollars in donations to its recommended charities after its first year, roughly 1 million dollars in 2009, and over 5 million dollars by 2011, growing as it narrowed its focus to a handful of causes where the evidence was strongest.[^3][^4] + +### The 2007 Marketing Controversy + +In December 2007 GiveWell's credibility was damaged by an online promotion scandal. Karnofsky posted on forums including Ask MetaFilter, Lifehacker, and Wall Street Journal comment sections under fabricated identities such as "geremiah," "Holden0," and "Research24," in some cases posing a question about how to choose a charity and then answering it himself with links to GiveWell. He also sent emails to bloggers impersonating a GiveWell staffer. Hassenfeld posted comments on Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and other sites, including under the alias "Talia," without disclosing his affiliation.[^5][^6] + +When the conduct was exposed by users on MetaFilter, GiveWell's board investigated and issued reprimands and penalties. Karnofsky was removed from his position as executive director in early January 2008 and the board imposed a financial penalty, cutting 5,000 dollars from his compensation and requiring him to take a professional-development course; he apologized for what he called a horrible lapse of judgement. Karnofsky was subsequently reinstated to a leadership role, and he and Hassenfeld remained at the head of the organization, with Hassenfeld continuing as chief executive into the 2020s.[^5][^6] + +### GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy + +In 2011 the foundation Good Ventures, newly created by Moskovitz and Tuna, made its first grant of 50,000 dollars to GiveWell and gave a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities, and Tuna joined GiveWell's board. In 2012 GiveWell moved its small staff from New York to San Francisco to be nearer Tuna and other technology donors, and the two organizations launched a joint research project called GiveWell Labs to look for high-impact giving opportunities beyond direct-aid charities. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and spun off as a separate organization in June 2017, taking on the larger and riskier giving (including AI-safety and pandemic work) while GiveWell kept its focus on measurable global-health charities.[^1][^2] + +GiveWell's published top charities have centered on a recurring set of interventions: the [[Against Malaria Foundation]] for insecticide-treated bed nets, [[Malaria Consortium]] for seasonal malaria chemoprevention, Helen Keller International for vitamin-A supplementation, New Incentives for vaccination incentives in Nigeria, and GiveDirectly for unconditional cash transfers. Money moved through GiveWell rose from about 27.8 million dollars in 2014 to 110.1 million in 2015 and to roughly 152 million by 2019, with Good Ventures grants accounting for a large share of those totals, and in 2025 GiveWell directed about 31 million dollars to charities hit by the freeze in USAID funding. Critics, including the Happier Lives Institute in November 2022, have challenged GiveWell's cost-effectiveness models for malaria prevention, deworming, and cash transfers.[^4][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Karnofsky and Hassenfeld's Bridgewater Associates background, the 2011 Good Ventures partnership, GiveWell Labs, and the August 2014 and June 2017 transitions to Open Philanthropy. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason +[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on the Good Ventures, GiveWell, and Open Philanthropy structure. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^3]: "Our Story," GiveWell, on the 2007 founding, the eight-person finance-industry group, the 300,000-dollar startup funding, and the original Clear Fund name. https://www.givewell.org/about/story +[^4]: "Our Progress," GiveWell, on money moved (over 30,000 dollars after year one, roughly 1 million in 2009, over 5 million in 2011, 27.8 million in 2014, 110.1 million in 2015, and about 152 million in 2019). https://www.givewell.org/about/progress +[^5]: "Full account of GiveWell staff's inappropriate online promotion in December 2007," GiveWell, on Karnofsky and Hassenfeld's undisclosed forum posting and fabricated identities. https://www.givewell.org/about/official-records/board-meeting-3/FAQ-on-inappropriate-marketing/full-account +[^6]: "GiveWell in turmoil after 'horrible lapse of judgement' by founders," *Alliance* magazine, on the board's removal of Karnofsky as executive director, the 5,000-dollar penalty and required course, and his apology and later reinstatement. https://www.alliancemagazine.org/news/givewell-in-turmoil-after-horrible-lapse-of-judgement-by-founders/ +[^7]: "GiveWell," InfluenceWatch, on the top charities (Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International, New Incentives, Sightsavers), the 2024 financials with Hassenfeld as chief executive, the 31-million-dollar 2025 USAID response, and the Happier Lives Institute critique. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/givewell/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ad7f88e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - GoodVentures + - DustinMoskovitz + - CariTuna + - EffectiveAltruism + - OpenPhilanthropy + - Philanthropy +alias: + - Good Ventures Foundation +summary: "Good Ventures is the foundation founded in 2011 by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and the journalist Cari Tuna that, through its partnership with GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, became the dominant funder of the effective-altruism, global-health, and AI-safety grant ecosystem." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Good Ventures is a private philanthropic foundation established in 2011 by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife, the former journalist [[Cari Tuna]]. Its partnership with the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]] produced [[Open Philanthropy]] (renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025), and the foundation supplies nearly all of that organization's grant money, making the Moskovitz and Tuna fortune the dominant and most durable financial source behind the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, evidence-based global health and development, and AI-safety research.[^1][^2] + +### The 2011 Founding + +Moskovitz, who retained roughly two percent of Facebook at its 2012 public offering and built a second fortune at the workplace-software company Asana, and Tuna, who had been a reporter at the *Wall Street Journal*, created Good Ventures in 2011 as the vehicle for giving away the bulk of their wealth. They were among the youngest signatories of the [[Giving Pledge]], the Bill Gates and [[Warren Buffett]] commitment to donate the majority of one's fortune, signing in 2014 in their late twenties and early thirties. Tuna served as president of the foundation and became the public face of the operation, articulating a "give where it does the most good" framework that delegated cause selection to a professional research staff applying cost-effectiveness analysis rather than to the donors' personal sentiment.[^1][^3] + +Almost immediately the new foundation oriented itself around GiveWell, the charity evaluator that [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded in 2007 after working as investment analysts at [[Bridgewater Associates]], the world's largest hedge fund. Good Ventures made its first grant, of 50,000 dollars, to GiveWell itself in 2011, and in the same year directed a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. Tuna joined GiveWell's board in 2011, formalizing the relationship. In 2012 GiveWell relocated its office and five-person staff from New York to San Francisco to be closer to Tuna and other technology donors, and Good Ventures and GiveWell announced a close partnership that June.[^1][^4] + +### GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy + +The partnership produced a joint research project called GiveWell Labs, launched in 2012 to look for giving opportunities beyond the direct-aid global-health charities that GiveWell already recommended. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and was spun off from GiveWell as a separate organization in June 2017, though the two retained overlapping boards and staff and shared office space in downtown San Francisco. The split divided two functions: GiveWell continued recommending a short list of proven, measurable charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, and harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale made possible, including pandemic preparedness, farm-animal welfare, scientific research, and the prevention of catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence.[^1][^4] + +Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence both organizations have acknowledged. The longtermist and AI-risk portion of that giving flowed to the research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to [[OpenAI]] in 2017 that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, and later became an early investor in the AI company [[Anthropic]]. Karnofsky, who served as co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]]. The [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] briefly funded the same longtermist and AI-safety field in 2022 before evaporating when FTX collapsed that November.[^2][^5] + +### The Dominant Funder + +By the mid-2010s Good Ventures had become by far the largest single donor channeling money through GiveWell, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the estimated 375 million dollars GiveWell had moved to its favored organizations, with annual Good Ventures grants of 70.4 million dollars in 2015, 50.4 million in 2016, and 75.1 million in 2017. As of August 2022 the foundation reported having granted more than 1.7 billion dollars across global health and development, farmed-animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and other cause areas. By 2025 Moskovitz and Tuna had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative giving since 2011, including more than 600 million dollars in 2025 alone, with Good Ventures making 493 grants in 2024 at a median grant size of about 115,000 dollars.[^1][^2][^6] + +The concentration of so much AI-safety and effective-altruism funding under a single foundation drew sustained criticism. Because Good Ventures funds much of the research community that examines the AI labs, and because Open Philanthropy was an early investor in Anthropic, observers argued that the field scrutinizing the AI companies depended financially on one donor couple who were also early backers of one of those companies. When Open Philanthropy rebranded as Coefficient Giving in November 2025 and began running multi-donor funds that other philanthropists could join, Good Ventures remained its founding and most significant ongoing partner and the source of the bulk of its capital.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on the 2011 founding of Good Ventures, the first 50,000-dollar grant to GiveWell, the additional 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities in 2011, Tuna joining the GiveWell board, the 2012 San Francisco relocation, GiveWell Labs, and the 60-percent share of GiveWell's 375 million dollars moved. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason +[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on Good Ventures as the primary funder of Open Philanthropy. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^3]: "Cari Tuna," EA Forum topic entry on Good Ventures and the Giving Pledge. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/cari-tuna +[^4]: "Our Progress," GiveWell, on GiveWell Labs launching in 2012, its August 2014 rename to the Open Philanthropy Project, and the June 2017 spin-off; annual Good Ventures grant totals of 70.4 million dollars (2015), 50.4 million (2016), and 75.1 million (2017). https://www.givewell.org/about/progress +[^5]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder, the 2017 OpenAI grant and board seat, and the Karnofsky-Amodei marriage. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^6]: "Moskovitz & Tuna: $600M Donated in 2025, Over $4B Total Since 2011," IndexBox, on the 4-billion-dollar cumulative total, the 600 million in 2025, and the 493 grants in 2024 at a 115,000-dollar median. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/dustin-moskovitz-cari-tunas-4b-philanthropy-journey/ +[^7]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename and the multi-donor expansion with Good Ventures as the founding partner. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Hereticon.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Hereticon.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8603cbc3 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Hereticon.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Hereticon + - FoundersFund + - PeterThiel + - MikeSolana + - PirateWires + - Heterodoxy +alias: + - Hereticon Conference +summary: "Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by Founders Fund executive Mike Solana, announced in October 2019 and first held January 10 to 13, 2022, self-described as 'a conference for thoughtcrime,' whose programming spans immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, and ideological heterodoxy." +location: "United States (rotating sites)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by [[Mike Solana]], a partner and the chief marketing officer of [[Founders Fund]], self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programming spans immortality and life-extension research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, the ethics of defense technology, and ideological heterodoxy on questions the mainstream press is treated as having closed. Founders Fund, the [[Peter Thiel]] venture firm, bankrolls the conference.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Founding and the Solana Organizing Role + +Founders Fund announced Hereticon in October 2019 through a launch that framed the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums. The *Business Insider* and [[Gizmodo]] coverage of the announcement described the planned program as including sessions on immortality, UFOs, and doomsday prepping. The inaugural event was delayed by the pandemic and held January 10 through 13, 2022, at a site kept private to facilitate what Solana described as a spirit of openness among attendees.[^1][^2] + +Mike Solana is the conference's organizer and the public face of the project. Solana is a longtime Founders Fund executive who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and is the founder and editor-in-chief of [[Pirate Wires]], the Substack-based media outlet that covers the intersection of technology and politics from the Thiel-network perspective. *The Atlantic* profiled Solana in October 2024 as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading in what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. Solana's role at Hereticon places a single individual in control of the conference's programming, the Founders Fund media arm (Pirate Wires), and a senior position at the venture firm itself.[^3][^4][^5] + +### Programming and the Thoughtcrime Frame + +The conference tagline, "a conference for thoughtcrime," is drawn from the George Orwell *1984* concept and signals the programming posture: topics are selected on the basis that the mainstream institutional consensus has declared them closed, disreputable, or beyond discussion. The *Reason* magazine interview with Solana in May 2022 covered the framing in detail, with Solana arguing that deplatforming and tribalism had narrowed the range of ideas the mainstream press would entertain and that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse.[^4] + +The documented programming includes sessions on life-extension and immortality research (a long-running Thiel interest), UFO claims (including promoters of the extraterrestrial-hypothesis framing), doomsday prepping and civilizational risk, the ethics of defense technology development, and revisitations of Thiel's own 1995 essay *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The Founders Fund podcast *Anatomy of Next* has published Hereticon sessions including one titled "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel on *The Diversity Myth*. The UFO and life-extension programming overlaps with the broader Thiel-network interest in topics that sit at the edge of mainstream institutional credibility.[^3][^6] + +### The Startups-as-Cults Frame + +The conference's heterodoxy programming sits within a documented Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics as an organizing model. In *[[Zero to One]]* (2014), Thiel and [[Blake Masters]] write that "the best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults," distinguishing a successful startup from a cult only in that the startup is "fanatically right about something those outside it have missed." The Dialog society, the wider Thiel convening vehicle, placed a session on "cult-building" on its 2026 retreat agenda alongside sessions on artificial intelligence, sexuality, and preparation for war.[^7][^8] + +Hereticon's immortality, life-extension, and artificial-intelligence programming overlaps with the transhumanist and artificial-intelligence-risk concerns of the [[Rationalist Community]], the Bay Area subculture Thiel funded from 2005 through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Singularity Summit]]. That subculture produced its own formations described as cults, including [[Leverage Research]] and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group, and supplied part of the heterodox-intellectual population from which conferences of this kind draw.[^9] + +### The Founders Fund Portfolio Overlap + +The conference audience and speaker roster overlap with the Founders Fund portfolio and with the broader Thiel convening network. Founders Fund portfolio companies, the [[Dialog]] conference's technology-side membership, and the [[PayPal Mafia]] network all supply the population from which Hereticon's invitation list is drawn. The conference is private, with no published attendee list and no press access, which places it structurally closer to the Dialog format than to an open industry conference.[^1][^7] + +Dialog, founded in 2006, convenes a wide invitation list across U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, and the military. Hereticon, founded in 2019, convenes a narrower list oriented to ideological heterodoxy and to the Founders Fund portfolio. The two share the Founders Fund financial base and the Thiel reputational base, and the smaller conference is more selective than the larger one.[^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Peter Thiel's VC Firm Founders Fund Announces Hereticon." *Business Insider,* October 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-vc-firm-founders-fund-hereticon-conference-immortality-ufo-2019-10 +[^2]: "Peter Thiel's VC Fund to Host Conference for Ideological 'Heretics.'" *Gizmodo,* 2019. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiels-vc-fund-to-host-conference-for-ideological-1838685821 +[^3]: Founders Fund. "Anatomy of Next" podcast, Hereticon episodes. https://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/ +[^4]: "Mike Solana Wants You To Commit Thoughtcrimes." *Reason,* May 15, 2022. https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commit-thoughtcrimes/ +[^5]: "The Most Opinionated Man in America." *The Atlantic,* October 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/ +[^6]: "I Attended Hereticon." *Minding the Campus,* November 13, 2024. https://mindingthecampus.org/2024/11/13/i-attended-hereticon/ +[^7]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^8]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. +[^9]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding the Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/JPMorgan Chase.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/JPMorgan Chase.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..36f3848e --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/JPMorgan Chase.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - JeffreyEpstein + - JPMorgan + - Banking + - MoneyLaundering + - PrivateBanking + - SexTrafficking + - JesStaley +alias: + - JPMorgan + - J.P. Morgan + - JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. +summary: "Largest U.S. bank, which kept Jeffrey Epstein as a private-banking client from 1998 to 2013 despite internal compliance warnings and later paid 290 million dollars to his victims and 75 million dollars to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle sex-trafficking-facilitation claims." +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the largest bank in the United States by assets, headquartered in [[New York City]] and led since 2006 by chief executive [[Jamie Dimon]]. From 1998 to 2013 it maintained [[Jeffrey Epstein]] as a private-banking and wealth-management client across the period during which Epstein was arrested, pleaded guilty to a Florida prostitution charge, and registered as a sex offender. In 2023 the bank settled two lawsuits in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York]] before [[Jed Rakoff]], paying 290 million dollars to a class of Epstein's victims and 75 million dollars to the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]], and it filed a third-party claim seeking to shift liability to its former executive [[Jes Staley]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Epstein Banking Relationship + +Epstein became a client of JPMorgan's private bank in 1998, and the relationship was managed by Staley, who led [[JPMorgan Asset Management]] and later the investment bank.[^1] The bank retained Epstein through his 2006 arrest in [[Palm Beach, Florida]], his 2008 guilty plea to soliciting a minor for prostitution, and his registration as a sex offender, generating fees and using Epstein as a referral source for wealthy prospective clients.[^1] [[Mary Erdoes]], who ran the bank's asset and wealth management division, was identified in victims' filings as a defender of keeping Epstein as a client.[^4] + +In a July 2011 email, JPMorgan general counsel [[Stephen Cutler]] told Erdoes and Staley that Epstein was "not an honorable person in any way" and "should not be a client," and Cutler later testified under oath that Staley and Erdoes made the decision to retain him.[^4] Plaintiffs alleged that the bank processed payments consistent with the trafficking operation, including cash withdrawals and transfers to women and to alleged co-conspirators, and that JPMorgan underreported suspicious activity to authorities.[^4] A deposition indicated that Dimon said he was not aware of a 2011 internal warning about Epstein.[^5] + +JPMorgan exited the Epstein relationship in 2013, the same year Staley left the bank for [[BlueMountain Capital]].[^4] Epstein then moved his accounts to [[Deutsche Bank]], which banked him from 2013 until 2018.[^6] + +### The 2023 Litigation Before Judge Rakoff + +Two suits proceeded against JPMorgan in the Southern District of New York before Judge Rakoff. One was brought by a survivor identified as Jane Doe 1 on behalf of a class of women abused by Epstein, alleging the bank knowingly benefited from and facilitated his sex trafficking.[^2] The other was brought by the Government of the United States Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned [[Little Saint James]], alleging the bank ignored red flags about his conduct on the island.[^3] Both suits asserted that JPMorgan kept Epstein despite documented internal concern and processed transactions that supported the abuse.[^2][^3] + +On March 9, 2023 JPMorgan filed a third-party complaint against Staley within the Virgin Islands action, asserting indemnification, contribution, breach of fiduciary duty, and "faithless servant" claims and seeking to recover compensation paid to him from at least 2006 through 2013.[^7] The complaint alleged Staley had concealed his personal activities with Epstein and misrepresented Epstein's character to the bank.[^7] Staley moved to dismiss, contending the bank was using him as a "shield" for its own failures.[^8] + +In June 2023 JPMorgan agreed to pay 290 million dollars to resolve the survivors' class claims, and in September 2023 it agreed to pay 75 million dollars to settle the Virgin Islands suit.[^2][^3] The bank did not admit wrongdoing in either settlement.[^3] The Virgin Islands settlement allocated 30 million dollars to charitable organizations, 25 million dollars to strengthen anti-trafficking law enforcement, and 20 million dollars to attorneys' fees.[^3] Judge Rakoff granted final approval of the 290 million dollar class settlement at a hearing in November 2023.[^9] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/ +[^2]: "JPMorgan Chase and Epstein survivor Jane Doe 1 reach $290 million settlement," *NPR,* 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181675580/epstein-jane-doe-1-290-million-settlement-jpmorgan-chase +[^3]: "JPMorgan Chase settles Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking suit by U.S. Virgin Islands for $75 million," *CNBC,* 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/jpmorgan-to-settle-jeffrey-epstein-suit-by-virgin-islands.html +[^4]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/ +[^5]: "JPMorgan's Dimon not aware of 2011 warning about Jeffrey Epstein: Deposition," *AOL / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.aol.com/dimon-not-aware-2011-warning-235933765.html +[^6]: New York State Department of Financial Services, In the Matter of Deutsche Bank AG, Consent Order Under New York Banking Law sections 39 and 44, July 6, 2020. https://www.dfs.ny.gov/industry_guidance/enforcement_discipline/ea20200706_deutsche_bank +[^7]: "JPMorgan Sues Ex-Executive Associated With Jeffrey Epstein," *Time,* 2023. https://time.com/6261243/jpmorgan-lawsuit-jes-staley-epstein-trafficking/ +[^8]: "Jes Staley Says JPMorgan Using Him as 'Shield' for Epstein Failures," *U.S. News & World Report / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-04-24/jes-staley-seeks-to-dismiss-jpmorgan-chase-lawsuit-over-jeffrey-epstein +[^9]: "JPMorgan's $290 million settlement with Epstein accusers wins approval by U.S. judge," *CNBC / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/jpmorgans-290-million-settlement-with-epstein-accusers-wins-approval-by-us-judge.html diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Leverage Research.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Leverage Research.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c8b22b35 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Leverage Research.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - LeverageResearch + - Rationalism + - EffectiveAltruism + - Cult + - PeterThiel + - PsychologicalControl +alias: + - Leverage + - Paradigm Academy +summary: "Leverage Research is a Bay Area organization run from 2011 to 2019 by the philosopher Geoff Anders that recruited from the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu to pursue a 'one true theory of psychology' through intensive group experimentation, and that former members later described as a coercive, cult-like environment." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area; New York" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Leverage Research is an organization founded in 2011 by the philosopher [[Geoff Anders]] that operated until a 2019 restructuring, recruiting from the [[Rationalist Community]] and the [[Effective Altruism]] movement to pursue what Anders called the "one true theory of psychology" and a program to remake its members into world-altering "super-people." Former members, most prominently [[Zoe Curzi]], later published detailed accounts describing the group as practicing coercive psychological control, and it became one of several cult formations to emerge from the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] social network in [[Berkeley]] and [[California]].[^1][^2] + +### Connection Theory and the Research Program + +Anders's central construct was "Connection Theory," which he presented as a comprehensive and predictive account of the human mind. Leverage members lived and worked together and submitted to long sessions of "debugging" and "charting," confrontational psychological exercises lasting two to six hours that were aimed at correcting a person's beliefs and psyche so they could become, in Curzi's account, "a sort of Musk-level super-person." Members reported a culture in which Anders was held to be possibly "the only mind who has ever existed who is capable of saving the world" and Connection Theory "the One True Theory of Psychology."[^1] + +The organization also did political and social "mapping" work, attempting to chart networks of influence as part of a long-range plan to take and reshape institutional power. It operated under several names and affiliated entities, including Paradigm Academy and the Leverage 2.0 research operation that succeeded the original group after 2019.[^2][^3] + +### Effective Altruism and Funding + +Leverage was embedded in the early effective-altruism infrastructure: the organization ran the Effective Altruism Summit in 2013 and the EA Global precursor events, placing Anders's group at an organizing center of the movement during its formative years. Leverage invited [[Center for Applied Rationality|CFAR]] to deliver a version of its workshop at the 2013 summit, knitting the two organizations together at the movement's founding. Its funding came through the rationalist, effective-altruism, and cryptocurrency worlds rather than from a single institutional donor.[^2][^7] + +The organization operated near Lake Merritt in [[Oakland]], where roughly half the members lived in a Leverage-run building and signed confidentiality agreements restricting what they could say publicly about the work. It ran a 2016 summer program, the Pareto Fellowship, with about twenty participants, which functioned as a recruiting funnel from the broader rationalist and EA scenes into the resident research community. New members were particularly encouraged to move into the shared building, concentrating the group's social and working life in one location.[^7] + +The documented link to [[Peter Thiel]] runs through the cryptocurrency startup [[Reserve]], co-founded by Nevin Freeman, an early Leverage employee and a co-founder of Paradigm Academy, alongside Miguel Morel, with the stated aim of generating money for non-profit causes including Leverage. Anders advised Reserve and stood to benefit financially if it succeeded, and the venture initially recruited, by one Leverage-side account, "basically a hundred percent" from Leverage Research and Paradigm Academy members. The connection places the Thiel commercial network one funding hop from the Leverage organization, through a crypto venture seeded by Leverage-adjacent founders.[^4][^8] + +Reserve raised about five million dollars in a 2018 round that drew in forty-three funds and angel investors, with [[Coinbase]] Ventures, [[Sam Altman]], and Thiel among the named backers of the dollar-pegged stablecoin. Freeman framed the project in expansive terms, saying he wanted to "create a currency that would outlast empires rising and falling" and to be "one of the people who has a boatload of money and is willing to fund things before they're popular." Morel later left to found the blockchain-analytics firm Arkham Intelligence after a brief involvement with Paradigm Academy's methods.[^4][^9] + +### Cult Allegations and Disclosures + +In October 2021 Curzi published "My Experience with Leverage Research," a first-person account of psychological harm at the organization, which circulated widely on [[LessWrong]] and prompted parallel disclosures about the adjacent MIRI and CFAR environments. Curzi described group debugging sessions, beliefs about demons and "objects" implanted in members' minds, intense secrecy and information control, and the difficulty of leaving. She republished an expanded account in 2024, stating that she believed Leverage had been harmful enough to her and others that the record should be made public.[^1][^5] + +Members on the payroll were expected to undergo charting and debugging sessions with a supervisory "trainer" who combined the roles of manager and therapist, and to train others in turn, building a chain of psychological authority through the organization. The practice extended to "bodywork" involving physical contact described variously as massage, energy work, or embodiment technique. Several participants who did extensive charting reported lasting dissociation and a sense of psychic fragmentation that they found difficult to reverse. The culture, in the accounts gathered on LessWrong, treated disagreement with Anders's theories or project strategy as a sign that a member simply was not "there yet," foreclosing dissent as a developmental failing rather than a substantive objection.[^2][^7] + +The Leverage disclosures, alongside the contemporaneous MIRI and CFAR accounts and the later [[The Zizians|Zizian]] killings, established the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu as the common origin of multiple groups characterized as cults. The [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] tendency drew from the same recruitment pool.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Curzi, Zoe. "My Experience with Leverage Research," *Medium,* originally published 2021, expanded 2024; first-person disclosure-side account. https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b +[^2]: "Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0," LessWrong, 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0 +[^3]: "You Will Not Remember This Essay: On 'Antimemes' and the Failures of Rationalism," *The Metropolitan Review,* on Leverage Research and Connection Theory. https://metropolitanreview.com/you-will-not-remember-this-essay/ +[^4]: "Arkham Intelligence, Reserve, and the Leverage Research 'cult,'" *Protos,* on the Reserve cryptocurrency project's links to the Leverage ecosystem and its investor roster including Peter Thiel, Coinbase, and Sam Altman. https://protos.com/arkham-intelligence-reserve-and-the-leverage-research-cult/ +[^5]: "Zoe Curzi's Experience with Leverage Research," LessWrong, October 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPwEptSSFRCnfHqFk/zoe-curzi-s-experience-with-leverage-research +[^6]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe +[^7]: "Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0," LessWrong, 2021; on the Lake Merritt building, confidentiality agreements, the Pareto Fellowship, the trainer/debugging structure, bodywork, and reported dissociation. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0 +[^8]: "Arkham Intelligence, Reserve, and the Leverage Research 'cult,'" *Protos,* on Nevin Freeman's Leverage role, Miguel Morel, Anders's advisory benefit, and Reserve's recruitment from Leverage and Paradigm. https://protos.com/arkham-intelligence-reserve-and-the-leverage-research-cult/ +[^9]: "Big-name Investors Coinbase and Peter Thiel Back New Stable Token 'Reserve,'" *Coinspeaker,* June 29, 2018; on the roughly five-million-dollar round, the forty-three backers, and the named investors. https://www.coinspeaker.com/2018/06/29/big-name-investors-coinbase-and-peter-thiel-back-new-stable-token-reserve/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Machine Intelligence Research Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Machine Intelligence Research Institute.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ba20a230 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Machine Intelligence Research Institute.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - MIRI + - Rationalism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - PeterThiel + - Transhumanism + - Singularity +alias: + - MIRI + - Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence + - SIAI + - Singularity Institute +summary: "The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged." +location: "Berkeley, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is an artificial-intelligence-risk research nonprofit based in [[Berkeley]], [[California]], founded in 2000 by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] with the internet entrepreneurs [[Brian Atkins]] and [[Sabine Atkins]] under the name the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). The organization argued that a self-improving machine intelligence posed a near-term existential threat to humanity and that the central problem of the era was building such a system so that it would be "friendly" to human values. [[Peter Thiel]] began funding the institute in 2005 and the next year cofounded its public-facing conference, the [[Singularity Summit]], with Yudkowsky and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]]. The institute was renamed MIRI in January 2013.[^1][^2][^3] + +The institute's blog and discussion community became the organizational seedbed of the [[Rationalist Community]], the [[LessWrong]] subculture, and the overlapping [[Effective Altruism]] movement. The Berkeley social network that formed around the institute and its spin-off the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] was the recruitment pool from which the [[Leverage Research]] organization, the [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] tendency, and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] formation drew their members.[^4][^5] + +### Founding and the Friendly AI Thesis + +Yudkowsky, an autodidact who did not attend high school or college, founded the Singularity Institute in 2000 to work on what he termed "Friendly AI," the problem of aligning a future superintelligent system with human values before it could be built. The Atkinses, who had made money in the early commercial internet, provided the initial funding. The institute's thesis held that the default outcome of building artificial general intelligence was human extinction, and that solving the alignment problem was the most important task facing the species.[^1][^2] + +The institute's intellectual output ran through Yudkowsky's prolific online writing rather than through peer-reviewed publication. The "Sequences," a multi-year series of blog posts on cognitive bias, Bayesian reasoning, and rationality that Yudkowsky wrote between 2006 and 2009, became the founding text of the rationalist subculture and were later collected as the book *Rationality: From AI to Zombies*.[^4] + +### Thiel Funding and the Singularity Summit + +Thiel began donating to the Singularity Institute in 2005. In 2006 he joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil to found the Singularity Summit, held that year at [[Stanford University]], which over the following six years grew into a prominent annual gathering for futurists, transhumanists, and AI researchers. Thiel delivered keynote addresses at the summit and became the institute's most prominent early backer; his cumulative donations to the institute were later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars.[^2][^3][^6] + +The Thiel funding period (2005 through the early 2010s) coincided with the institute's relocation of its center of gravity to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] and the formation of the in-person rationalist community there. Thiel's interest cooled by the mid-2010s; he later said the people he had funded had shifted "from transhumanism to Luddite," a reversal he made public in 2025 when he named Yudkowsky, alongside the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]] and the climate activist [[Greta Thunberg]], as an example of what his lectures called the "Antichrist," a technology-stopping figure he said had become "deranged."[^3][^7] + +### The Rename, CFAR, and the Singularity Brand Sale + +In 2012 the institute spun off the Center for Applied Rationality as a separate Berkeley nonprofit to teach the rationality techniques developed in the community through paid workshops. CFAR had been incubated inside the institute under the working name "Rationality Group" and was formally established on May 8, 2012. Singularity University acquired the Singularity Summit on December 6, 2012, and on January 30, 2013, the institute renamed its research operation the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, narrowing its public mission to technical AI-alignment research.[^2][^9] + +The leadership of the organization turned over through the same period. [[Luke Muehlhauser]] had become executive director in November 2011, succeeding Vassar; he resigned on May 6, 2015, to join [[Open Philanthropy]], and [[Nate Soares]] took the post on June 3, 2015, holding it until he moved to the title of president in April 2023, when Yudkowsky became chair of the board. The institute's funding shifted from individual donors toward institutional grants and large cryptocurrency gifts: Open Philanthropy granted 500,000 dollars in August 2016, 3.75 million over three years in October 2017, and 7,703,750 over two years in February 2020, while Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin gave roughly 763,970 dollars in ether in December 2017 and a further 4.4 million in ether in May 2021.[^9] + +### Internal Crises and Adjacent Harm + +The Berkeley community around MIRI and CFAR produced several documented psychological crises and a cluster of organizations later described as cults. A former MIRI researcher, [[Jessica Taylor]], was hospitalized for roughly three weeks in 2017 with delusions she described as feeling "intrinsically evil," an episode she and others connected to the high-intensity "debugging" and world-saving culture of the milieu and to conversations with Michael Vassar, a former president of the institute.[^5] + +Vassar, who led the Singularity Institute from 2009 to 2011, later built a circle informally called the Vassarites that recruited from the MIRI and CFAR social network and practiced a confrontational psychological method, sometimes combined with psychedelics, aimed at "jailbreaking" members from what Vassar characterized as a corrupt and conformist society. Geoff Anders ran the separate Leverage Research organization out of the same recruitment pool. The Zizians, the formation led by [[Jack LaSota]] that was later tied to six killings across three states, originated as a splinter that attended CFAR programs and protested a CFAR reunion in 2019 before breaking with the community entirely.[^4][^5][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" and the founding of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 2000. See contemporaneous institute records and the timeline maintained at timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute. +[^2]: Intelligence.org (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), "Singularity Summit" archive. https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/ +[^3]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel beginning to fund Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute in 2005 and cofounding the Singularity Summit in 2006. +[^4]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Rationality: From AI to Zombies* (collected "Sequences," 2006 through 2009). Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. +[^5]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021, first-person account by a former MIRI researcher; treated as a primary disclosure-side source. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe +[^6]: "Peter Thiel (Funder)," and reported cumulative donations to the Singularity Institute exceeding 1.6 million dollars. Cross-referenced against the MIRI donation timeline. +[^7]: "Peter Thiel Thinks the Antichrist Is 'Someone Like' This AI Doomer That He Funded," *Gizmodo,* October 2025. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-thinks-the-antichrist-is-someone-like-this-ai-doomer-that-he-funded-2000671027 +[^8]: Foster-Burnett, Sam and others, "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/ +[^9]: "Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute," Timelines Wiki, on the May 8, 2012 establishment of CFAR (formerly "Rationality Group"), the December 6, 2012 sale of the Singularity Summit to Singularity University, the January 30, 2013 rename to MIRI, the Muehlhauser and Soares executive-director tenures, the April 2023 board reshuffle, and the Open Philanthropy and Vitalik Buterin donation amounts. https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Mankind Quarterly.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Mankind Quarterly.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..21c58b0b --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Mankind Quarterly.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - RaceScience + - Eugenics + - PioneerFund + - HumanBiodiversity + - AcademicPublishing +alias: + - The Mankind Quarterly + - MQ +summary: "Mankind Quarterly is a journal founded in 1960-1961 with Pioneer Fund money to publish hereditarian race-and-intelligence research that mainstream journals rejected, widely described as a cornerstone of the scientific-racism establishment." +location: "Edinburgh, Scotland" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Mankind Quarterly is an academic journal launched in 1960 and 1961 to publish hereditarian research on race and inheritance that mainstream scientific journals had declined, and over six decades it became the central periodical of organized race science. Its founding was financed in part by [[Wickliffe Draper]] of the [[Pioneer Fund]], it was edited for its first decades by the Scottish anthropologist [[Robert Gayre]], and it later passed to the anthropologist [[Roger Pearson]] and to the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]], whose [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]] now publishes it. Scholars and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] describe it as a white-supremacist outlet and a vehicle for material rejected as pseudoscience.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Funding + +The journal grew out of opposition to the 1950 [[UNESCO]] statement that rejected race as a meaningful biological category and to the desegregation of the American South. Its founders included Gayre, the geneticist [[Reginald Ruggles Gates]], the segregationist psychologist [[Henry Garrett]], and the Italian statistician [[Corrado Gini]], with the former Nazi geneticist [[Otmar von Verschuer]], who had collaborated with [[Josef Mengele]], among its associated figures. The cost of launching it was met with money from Draper and the Pioneer Fund, the [[New York City|New York]] foundation created in 1937 to promote eugenics and "race betterment." It was published in [[Edinburgh]] by the [[International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics]], a body Draper helped underwrite. Gayre received Pioneer Fund grants annually between 1962 and 1972.[^1][^3] + +The journal drew immediate condemnation from mainstream anthropology. In 1961 and 1962 the Mexican physical anthropologist [[Juan Comas]] published critiques in *Current Anthropology* and *American Anthropologist* charging that the journal reproduced discredited Nordicist and antisemitic racial ideology under a scientific veneer, and the British journal *[[Nature]]* ran a dismissive notice the same year. Gayre and his associate editors Garrett and Gates responded by filing a libel writ against the Royal Anthropological Institute and the editor of its journal *Man*; the suit ran from 1962 to 1965 before counsel advised the institute to settle. Garrett, who had chaired psychology at [[Columbia University]], openly campaigned against school desegregation through the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.[^6][^7] + +### Editorial Line and Successors + +Gayre edited the journal until 1978, when Pearson, a British anthropologist who had earlier published openly antisemitic and "Aryan" racial material, took it over and moved its operations to the United States. Lynn, a frequent contributor who became its assistant editor and then editor-in-chief, described the journal as having been established to present "the hereditarian case on race differences and related issues." After 2017 its website was registered to [[Emil Kirkegaard]], who also ran the non-peer-reviewed [[OpenPsych]] paper repository. The Ulster Institute, of which Lynn was president until his death in 2023, publishes it. Its contributors and editorial board overlapped heavily with those of the secret [[London Conference on Intelligence]] held at [[University College London]] between 2014 and 2017.[^2][^4] + +From 1979 to 2014 Pearson published the journal through his Washington-based [[Council for Social and Economic Studies]], and in January 2015 publication passed to Lynn's Ulster Institute. The biochemist [[Gerhard Meisenberg]], a Pioneer Fund director who also presented at the London Conference, served as editor-in-chief into the late 2010s; Lynn and Meisenberg coauthored work in its pages, including IQ-by-nation papers drawing on the data later repudiated by the [[European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association]]. Recurrent contributors over the decades included [[Davide Piffer]] and the segregation-era figures who carried the journal from its 1960s founders into the modern human-biodiversity network.[^8][^9] + +### Scientific Standing + +Mainstream genetics, anthropology, and psychology treat the journal as a fringe publication rather than a credible scientific venue. Critics have called it "a cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment" and "a white supremacist journal," and have characterized it as a place to publish questionable research "under the trappings of objective science" after such work was turned away by reputable outlets. Its claims of innate racial hierarchies in intelligence belong to the same hereditarian literature popularized by [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and circulated through the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] network around [[Steve Sailer]]; mainstream science holds that observed group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors rather than genetic ones.[^1][^2][^5] + +The geneticist [[Theodosius Dobzhansky]] described the journal early on as "a true racist periodical, the kind of thing which would gladden the heart of Mr. Goebbels or Mr. Hitler if they could read it." Lynn first published his national-IQ analysis in its pages in 1991, and his body of work accumulated more than 22,000 Google Scholar citations, a reach that researchers calling for retractions in 2024 cited as evidence that the journal's pseudoscience had seeped into the wider literature through later restatement in indexed venues. The journal continued publishing under the Ulster Institute after Lynn's death, carrying a low impact factor and remaining outside the recognized peer-review system.[^2][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism," *Smithsonian Magazine,* May 2018, on the journal's 1961 founding by figures including Otmar von Verschuer and Roger Pearson and its function as a platform for race science rejected by reputable journals. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/ +[^2]: "Roger Pearson," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on Pearson running Mankind Quarterly since 1978 and its characterization as a white-supremacist journal. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/roger-pearson +[^3]: "Draper's Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science," Undark, on Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, and Robert Gayre's grants. https://race.undark.org/articles/drapers-millions-the-philanthropic-wellspring-of-modern-race-science +[^4]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on Lynn, the Ulster Institute, and the journal's role. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/ +[^5]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the scientific rejection of hereditarian race-IQ claims. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/ +[^6]: Comas, Juan. "'Scientific' Racism Again?" *Current Anthropology,* vol. 2, 1961, and "Mankind Quarterly Under Heavy Criticism," *Current Anthropology,* 1962, on the early anthropological condemnation. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/200265 +[^7]: "Mankind Quarterly (A98)," Royal Anthropological Institute archives, on the 1962-1965 libel writ filed by Gayre, Garrett, and Gates against the RAI and the editor of *Man.* https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/archive-contents/mankind-quarterly-a98/ +[^8]: "Roger Pearson," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on Pearson's Council for Social and Economic Studies publishing Mankind Quarterly from 1979; and "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on the journal's move to the Ulster Institute for Social Research and Gerhard Meisenberg as editor-in-chief. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/roger-pearson +[^9]: "Draper's Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science," Undark, on the journal's continuity from its founders into the modern network. https://race.undark.org/articles/drapers-millions-the-philanthropic-wellspring-of-modern-race-science +[^10]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on the Dobzhansky characterization, Lynn's 1991 national-IQ paper, and the 22,000-citation figure. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/NSO Group.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/NSO Group.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d3721a3f --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/NSO Group.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - NSOGroup + - Pegasus + - Spyware + - Unit8200 + - Israel + - Khashoggi + - MBS + - PrivateIntelligence + - Surveillance +alias: + - NSO Group Technologies +summary: "NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence company founded in 2010 by Unit 8200 alumni Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio, and Niv Karmi, developer of the Pegasus spyware capable of zero-click mobile-phone compromise, whose government clients used the product to surveil over 50,000 targets including Jamal Khashoggi's family, 180 journalists, Catalan independence leaders, and Mexican activists before the July 2021 Pegasus Project exposure." +location: "Herzliya, Israel" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-intelligence company founded in 2010 in [[Herzliya]], [[Israel]], by [[Omri Lavie|Omri Lavie]], [[Shalev Hulio|Shalev Hulio]], and [[Niv Karmi|Niv Karmi]] (the company name derives from their first initials: N-S-O). The founders are alumni of [[Unit 8200|Unit 8200]], Israel's elite military intelligence signals-and-cyber unit that serves as the incubator of the Israeli private surveillance-technology sector. NSO developed [[Pegasus (spyware)|Pegasus]], a spyware capable of zero-click mobile-phone compromise that extracts messages, emails, photos, location data, and activates cameras and microphones without the target's knowledge. The [[Pegasus Project|Pegasus Project]] investigation (July 2021), coordinated by [[Forbidden Stories|Forbidden Stories]] and [[Amnesty International|Amnesty International]] across 80 journalists from 17 media outlets, documented a leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers selected as potential surveillance targets by NSO's government clients.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Unit 8200 Pipeline + +Unit 8200 is the IDF signals-intelligence and cyber-warfare unit that functions as the documented talent pipeline for the Israeli private cybersecurity and surveillance industry. NSO Group's founders are alumni of the unit, as are the founders of a documented network of Israeli surveillance-technology firms that collectively constitute the "tip of the iceberg" of what the [[OCCRP|OCCRP]] and the [[Boston Review|Boston Review]] describe as a largely unregulated transnational Israeli surveillance industry. Former IDF intelligence officers and former NSO employees have gone on to found additional firms developing zero-click weapons and offensive cyber tools, extending the Unit 8200 pipeline into the broader commercial-surveillance sector.[^4][^5] + +The Unit 8200 pipeline connects the NSO Group to the broader Israeli surveillance-technology export sector documented on the [[Carbyne|Carbyne]] page (the Epstein-Barak-Israeli surveillance-tech investment chain) and to the [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]]-Israel strategic partnership. The sector operates on the model documented by the [[Jacobin|Jacobin]] reporting: Israeli surveillance technology developed through the occupation of Palestinian territories is exported commercially, with the occupied territories functioning as what critics describe as a testing laboratory.[^5][^6] + +### Pegasus and the Government-Client Model + +NSO licensed Pegasus exclusively to government clients, framing the product as a counterterrorism tool. The documented deployment went far beyond counterterrorism. The Pegasus Project investigation documented that NSO's clients used Pegasus against heads of state, government officials, journalists, activists, political opponents, and the family members of targeted individuals. The leaked list of 50,000+ phone numbers includes targets across multiple countries.[^1][^3] + +The documented deployment patterns include: [[Mexico|Mexico]] (one of NSO's largest clients, where multiple administrations used Pegasus against journalists including [[Cecilio Pineda Brito|Cecilio Pineda Brito]], activists, lawyers, and even a child, per the [[Citizen Lab|Citizen Lab]] investigation); [[Catalonia|Catalonia]] (the "[[CatalanGate|CatalanGate]]" finding by Citizen Lab in 2022 documenting dozens of Catalan independence politicians and activists targeted by the Spanish state); [[El Salvador|El Salvador]] (surveillance continuing through 2022 despite NSO's reform pledges); and the [[Saudi Arabia|Saudi]] targeting of [[Jamal Khashoggi|Khashoggi]]'s associates.[^1][^7][^8][^9] + +### The Khashoggi Surveillance + +Pegasus was deployed against the associates of Jamal Khashoggi before the October 2018 murder inside the Saudi consulate in [[Istanbul|Istanbul]]. [[The Guardian|The Guardian]] reported in July 2021, based on the Pegasus Project leak, that Pegasus was found on the phone of Khashoggi's wife [[Hanan Elatr|Hanan Elatr]] months before the killing. An Emirati government agency separately placed NSO spyware on the phone of a Khashoggi associate, [[Al Jazeera|Al Jazeera]] reported. Khashoggi's friend [[Omar Abdul Aziz|Omar Abdul Aziz]] sued NSO Group, claiming the spyware enabled the murder by mapping Khashoggi's network and communications. A federal judge dismissed the widow's lawsuit against NSO in October 2023.[^10] + +The Khashoggi surveillance ran through the same [[Mohammed bin Salman|MBS]]-[[WhatsApp|WhatsApp]] channel that [[Jared Kushner|Jared Kushner]] used to communicate with the Saudi crown prince, and through the broader Saudi-Emirati intelligence network that operated Pegasus against the targets. The NSO Group sits at the intersection of the documented surveillance infrastructure that enabled the Khashoggi assassination and the Kushner-MBS relationship that shaped the Trump administration's response to it.[^10] + +### Ownership and the Novalpina Deal + +NSO was acquired by [[Francisco Partners|Francisco Partners]], a technology-focused private equity firm, in 2014. Francisco Partners's ownership period covered the initial expansion of the Pegasus client base across multiple governments, including the documented deployments in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the [[United Arab Emirates|United Arab Emirates]]. The Francisco Partners ownership placed a standard private-equity firm in operational control of a cyber-arms company in its portfolio.[^1][^11] + +In 2019, the co-founders Hulio and Lavie re-acquired NSO from Francisco Partners with funding from [[Novalpina Capital|Novalpina Capital]], a London-based private equity firm founded by [[Stephen Peel|Stephen Peel]]. The Novalpina acquisition valued NSO at approximately 1 billion dollars. The re-acquisition coincided with the period of intensifying scrutiny on NSO's government-client deployments, and the Novalpina ownership became itself a subject of controversy when Novalpina's limited partners raised concerns about the ethical implications of owning a cyber-arms company. Novalpina subsequently underwent its own internal crisis, and the ownership structure of NSO entered a period of documented instability.[^1][^11] + +The Pegasus Project investigation (July 2021) and the subsequent regulatory and legal pressure (including [[Apple|Apple]]'s lawsuit against NSO, the U.S. Commerce Department's addition of NSO to the [[Entity List|Entity List]] in November 2021, and the WhatsApp v. NSO litigation) have constrained the company's operations. The ownership trajectory from startup to Francisco Partners portfolio company to Novalpina-controlled entity to a constrained and legally challenged operation documents the arc of a private intelligence firm that operated with limited accountability through multiple ownership regimes.[^1][^11] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For NSO Group founding, ownership history, and the founders' Unit 8200 background, see the published NSO Group documentation and the Wikipedia record. +[^2]: "The Pegasus Project." *Amnesty International,* July 2021. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/07/the-pegasus-project-2/ +[^3]: "Pegasus: The New Global Weapon for Silencing Journalists." *Forbidden Stories.* https://forbiddenstories.org/pegasus-the-new-global-weapon-for-silencing-journalists/ +[^4]: "Where NSO Group Came From and Why It's Just the Tip of the Iceberg." *OCCRP.* https://www.occrp.org/en/project/the-pegasus-project/where-nso-group-came-from-and-why-its-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg +[^5]: "Cyberespionage with Benefits." *Boston Review.* https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/cyberespionage-with-benefits/ +[^6]: "Israel Has Turned the Occupied Territories Into a Laboratory for Surveillance." *Jacobin,* July 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/07/israel-occupation-surveillance-security-state-technology-export +[^7]: "Reckless Exploit: Mexican Journalists, Lawyers, and a Child Targeted with NSO Spyware." *Citizen Lab.* https://citizenlab.ca/research/reckless-exploit-mexico-nso/ +[^8]: For the Catalonia (CatalanGate) finding, see the Citizen Lab 2022 CatalanGate report. +[^9]: "NSO Group's Continued Surveillance." *Rest of World,* 2022 (El Salvador). https://restofworld.org/2022/nso-pegasus-el-salvador/ +[^10]: "NSO spyware used to target family of Jamal Khashoggi, leaked data shows." *The Guardian,* July 18, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus +[^11]: For the Novalpina Capital ownership deal, see the published NSO Group and Novalpina Capital documentation. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6e9156d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - OpenPhilanthropy + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - DustinMoskovitz +summary: "Open Philanthropy is the grantmaking organization funded by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna that became the durable financial backbone of effective altruism and AI-safety work, directing more than four billion dollars and serving as an early funder of Anthropic." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization, funded chiefly by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]], that became the durable financial backbone of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and of [[Longtermism|longtermist]] and AI-safety work. Where the [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] was the movement's flashiest and most short-lived funder, Open Philanthropy is its largest sustained one, directing more than four billion dollars in grants by 2025. It was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], and its longtime co-chief executive [[Holden Karnofsky]] later moved into AI-safety work and is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]].[^1][^2] + +### Origins + +The organization grew out of [[GiveWell]], the charity evaluator Karnofsky cofounded with [[Elie Hassenfeld]], and Good Ventures, the foundation Moskovitz and Tuna established in 2011. The two joined to form the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014, which began independent operations in 2017. Tuna, a former *Wall Street Journal* reporter, and Moskovitz, who made his fortune as one of the earliest Facebook employees and the cofounder of the software firm Asana, committed the bulk of their wealth to the effort.[^1][^3] + +The split from GiveWell separated two functions: GiveWell kept recommending a short list of proven global-health charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale allowed. [[Alexander Berger]] rose to co-chief executive alongside Karnofsky and became sole chief executive when Karnofsky stepped back in 2023. Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence the organization acknowledged when, operating as Coefficient Giving, it began advising outside donors and directed more than 100 million dollars of non-Good-Ventures money in 2024.[^2][^5] + +### Funding Priorities and the AI Turn + +Open Philanthropy makes grants in two broad areas: global health and wellbeing, and longtermism, the latter encompassing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, and the far future. Its AI-risk funding flowed to the same research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] that the [[Rationalist Community]] built, making Open Philanthropy the principal institutional patron of AI-safety work outside the technology companies themselves. Karnofsky took a leave from his co-chief-executive role in 2023 and moved into a role focused on AI strategy. The organization renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.[^2][^4] + +In 2017 Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to OpenAI that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, an early and unusual instance of a funder embedding itself inside an AI lab; it later became an early investor in Anthropic, where Karnofsky's wife Daniela Amodei is president. By June 2025 the organization had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative grants. The November 2025 rename to Coefficient Giving, under chief executive Alexander Berger, marked a shift toward running multi-donor funds so other philanthropists could pool money into its cause areas, with the name chosen to signal a "coefficient" that multiplies the impact of partner giving. Its concentration of AI-safety money has drawn criticism that a single foundation funds much of the field that scrutinizes the AI labs to which it is financially tied.[^2][^4][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy's EA-Inspired Programs," *Inside Philanthropy,* March 16, 2023. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2023-3-16-how-effective-is-effective-altruism-a-deep-dive-into-two-of-open-philanthropys-ea-inspired-programs +[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin +[^3]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Good Ventures, GiveWell, and the Open Philanthropy partnership. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason +[^4]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder and the Karnofsky tie. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6 +[^5]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename, Alexander Berger, the 4-billion-dollar grant total, and the multi-donor expansion; "OpenAI General Support," Good Ventures, on the March 2017 30-million-dollar grant and Karnofsky board seat. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/OpenAI.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/OpenAI.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..dbc7112d --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/OpenAI.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - OpenAI + - ArtificialIntelligence + - EffectiveAltruism + - PeterThiel + - ElonMusk + - SiliconValley +summary: "OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a billion-dollar pledge from backers including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, whose 2023 firing and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman exposed the conflict between its effective-altruism-aligned safety board and its commercial expansion." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence research company founded in [[San Francisco]] on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit laboratory whose stated mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Its founding was announced with a one-billion-dollar funding pledge from [[Elon Musk]], [[Sam Altman]], [[Greg Brockman]], [[Reid Hoffman]], [[Jessica Livingston]], [[Peter Thiel]], [[Amazon Web Services]], and [[Infosys]], though tax filings later showed that only about 133 million dollars had actually been received by 2021. The organization grew out of the same AI-existential-risk concern that animates the [[Rationalist Community]] and [[Effective Altruism]] movements, and its 2023 governance crisis exposed the fault line between that safety-focused mission and its commercial trajectory.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the Capped-Profit Pivot + +OpenAI was established as a counterweight to the concentration of AI capability in a single corporation, with Musk and Altman as co-chairs, Brockman as chief technology officer, and [[Ilya Sutskever]] as chief scientist. Musk departed the board in 2018 amid conflicts of interest with [[Tesla]]'s own AI work. In 2019 OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary beneath the nonprofit, took a one-billion-dollar investment from [[Microsoft]], and installed Altman as chief executive, restructuring a nonprofit research mission into an entity capable of raising commercial capital. The 2022 release of [[ChatGPT]] made OpenAI the central company of the generative-AI period.[^1][^3] + +The 2019 capped-profit entity, OpenAI LP, limited early investors to a return of 100 times their money, with lower caps for later backers such as Microsoft; profit above the cap would flow to the controlling nonprofit. Microsoft expanded its commitment to a reported 13 billion dollars by January 2023, receiving a large share of OpenAI's profits up to its cap until repaid. On October 28, 2025 OpenAI completed a further restructuring that retired the capped-profit model entirely: the nonprofit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, took a roughly 26 percent equity stake valued near 130 billion dollars in a new public-benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, Microsoft took a 27 percent stake worth about 135 billion dollars, and employees and investors held the remaining 47 percent, at a 500-billion-dollar valuation. The revised Microsoft agreement moved the power to declare that artificial general intelligence had been reached from OpenAI's board to an independent expert panel jointly established by the two companies.[^7][^8] + +### The November 2023 Board Crisis + +On November 17, 2023, the nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, stating that he had not been "consistently candid." The voting directors were Sutskever, [[Adam D'Angelo]], the entrepreneur [[Tasha McCauley]], and [[Helen Toner]] of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology; McCauley and Toner had ties to the effective-altruism movement, and the board's concern centered on the pace of AI commercialization relative to safety. Brockman quit in protest, roughly 700 employees threatened to resign, and within 48 hours directors discussed merging OpenAI with [[Anthropic]], a step Toner was reported to have supported and that would have ended OpenAI as an independent entity. Altman was reinstated within days under a reconstituted board chaired by [[Bret Taylor]] and including [[Larry Summers]], and Sutskever, McCauley, and Toner left.[^4][^5] + +The crisis was widely read as a defeat for the effective-altruism and AI-safety wing of the company by the commercial and accelerationist wing aligned with Altman and Microsoft. Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024, and Musk sued the company and Altman the same year, alleging a betrayal of the original nonprofit mission.[^4][^6] + +Musk's suit, filed in 2024 and later amended to name Microsoft as a defendant, alleged that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft and accused Altman of "rampant self-dealing." Musk amended the complaint so that any of the roughly 150 billion dollars in damages he sought would go to OpenAI's nonprofit rather than to himself, and sought to remove Altman as chief executive and director. In May 2026 a nine-member advisory jury found that Musk had filed outside the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the case.[^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "OpenAI launches as a nonprofit with a billion-dollar pledge," December 11, 2015; founding donors including Musk, Altman, Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, and Infosys. See IEEE Spectrum, December 2015. https://spectrum.ieee.org/billiondollar-nonprofit-ai-research-lab-to-open-in-san-francisco +[^2]: "OpenAI says Musk only ever contributed $45 million," *TechCrunch,* March 5, 2024, on actual versus pledged funding. https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/openai-response-elon-musk-lawsuit/ +[^3]: "The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI's bid to save the world," *MIT Technology Review,* February 17, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ +[^4]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained +[^5]: "Inside the Deposition That Showed How OpenAI Nearly Destroyed Itself," *Decrypt,* on the Sutskever deposition and the discussed Anthropic merger. https://decrypt.co/347349/inside-deposition-showed-openai-nearly-destroyed-itself +[^6]: "OpenAI, Sam Altman and Failed Governance," AKF Partners, postmortem of the November 2023 board crisis. https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/openai-sam-altman-and-failed-governance-a-postmortem-of-the-openai-governance-soap-opera +[^7]: "Microsoft's $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty," *CNBC,* April 8, 2023, on the 100x return cap and Microsoft's expanded investment. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-openai-brings-potential-and-uncertainty.html +[^8]: "OpenAI completes restructure, solidifying Microsoft as a major shareholder," *CNBC,* October 28, 2025, on the OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, the 27 percent Microsoft stake, and the AGI declaration panel. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft.html +[^9]: "Jury dismisses all claims in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman," *NPR,* May 18, 2026; "Musk's amended lawsuit against OpenAI names Microsoft as defendant," *TechCrunch,* November 14, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5822366/musk-altman-openai-jury-verdict-claims-dismissed diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Palantir Technologies.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Palantir Technologies.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8bcf80ef --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Palantir Technologies.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Palantir + - PeterThiel + - Surveillance + - DefenseContractor + - ICE + - CIA + - In-Q-Tel +alias: + - Palantir + - Palantir Software +summary: "Palantir Technologies is a data-analytics and defense contractor cofounded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings with CIA In-Q-Tel seed funding, that supplies data-integration platforms to U.S. intelligence, the Department of Defense, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement." +location: "Denver, Colorado (headquarters)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Palantir Technologies is an American data-analytics and software company founded in 2003 by [[Peter Thiel]], [[Alex Karp]], [[Joe Lonsdale|Joseph Lonsdale]], [[Stephen Cohen]], and [[Nathan Gettings]]. The company builds data-integration and decision-support platforms for government and commercial clients, and is structured around two principal products: [[Palantir Gotham|Gotham]], oriented to intelligence and defense users, and [[Palantir Foundry|Foundry]], oriented to commercial enterprises. The company received early institutional backing from the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] venture-capital arm [[In-Q-Tel]], and Thiel has served as chairman since founding. The company went public on the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in September 2020 under the ticker PLTR.[^1] + +The company's client base spans the agencies that consume intelligence and law-enforcement data, and its contracting posture is to build the shared data substrate across those agencies that the agencies themselves have not built internally. The 2026 [[Dialog]] leak placed Palantir's chairman (Thiel) at the center of an off-the-record convening network whose government-side attendees include the congressional oversight and military-command principals responsible for the agencies Palantir serves.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and In-Q-Tel + +Palantir was founded in 2003 in the aftermath of the [[September 11 attacks|9/11 attacks]], with Thiel as the founding financier and chairman. The company's stated founding premise was that U.S. intelligence agencies possessed large volumes of data in mutually incompatible silos and lacked the software to fuse it into operational intelligence, a gap the [[9/11 Commission]] had identified. The Central Intelligence Agency venture arm In-Q-Tel provided early funding. Karp, a law-school contemporary of Thiel at [[Stanford Law School]], serves as chief executive and is the public face of the company.[^1][^2] + +The founding team included Lonsdale, then a recent [[Stanford University]] graduate who had worked at Thiel's [[Clarium Capital]], as a founding engineer. Cohen and Gettings rounded out the technical cofounding group. The [[PayPal Mafia]] lineage is direct: the fraud-detection heritage is consciously modeled on the anti-fraud data systems Thiel and [[Max Levchin]] built at [[PayPal]]. Palantir's data-fusion architecture for intelligence and law enforcement is an adaptation of the payments-fraud-detection architecture, the basis for the recurring internal claim that the company "does for governments what PayPal did for fraud."[^2] + +### Gotham and the Intelligence Client Base + +[[Gotham]] is Palantir's government platform, deployed across the Central Intelligence Agency, the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]], the Department of Defense, the [[National Security Agency|NSA]], and allied foreign intelligence services. The platform integrates structured and unstructured data from multiple source systems into a unified ontology, allowing analysts to query across what would otherwise be siloed databases. The company's early growth was driven by counterterrorism and defense contracting in the post-9/11 period, and Palantir was used in the operation that located [[Osama bin Laden]] in 2011, according to company and press accounts.[^1][^2] + +The ontology approach distinguishes Gotham from a data warehouse. Rather than copying data into a central store, Gotham defines a common object model (people, organizations, events, locations, documents) and maps each connected source system's data into that model, so that an analyst querying "all financial transactions involving this person and their known associates" pulls from the connected financial, communications, and travel databases in a single query. The platform's power scales with the number and sensitivity of the connected sources, so the client roster, not the software, measures the reach.[^1] + +### ICE and Immigration Enforcement + +The ICE relationship began in 2013 with the [[FALCON]] analytical platform, which integrates data from multiple federal and state sources (including [[Homeland Security Investigations]] and state [[Department of Motor Vehicles]] records) into a unified analytical view. In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir the [[Investigative Case Management]] (ICM) contract for over 41 million dollars, extending FALCON's analytical capability into the full case-management lifecycle from criminal and civil detention through deportation. [[EPIC]] (Electronic Privacy Information Center) documented the system's capabilities through the [[EPIC v. ICE|EPIC v. ICE]] FOIA litigation.[^1][^3] + +The [[WNYC]] reporting documented, on the basis of obtained emails, that Palantir created a smartphone application ICE uses to plan and execute workplace raids. The [[404 Media]] reporting documented the [[ELITE (app)|ELITE]] app, which ICE uses to identify neighborhoods for enforcement operations. In the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration, ICE awarded Palantir a 30 million dollar contract for [[ImmigrationOS]], extending the FALCON/ICM capability into a comprehensive immigration-tracking system. The [[ACLU]] published "All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign" documenting the expanded role.[^3][^4] + +[[Amnesty International]] published a September 2020 briefing finding that Palantir's ICM and FALCON platforms risk contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants. The [[American Immigration Council]] documented that FALCON and ICM have been used in workplace raids since deployment. Palantir employees in 2018 and 2019 circulated petitions asking the company to cancel the ICE work. The company declined.[^1][^3][^4] + +### Foundry and Commercial Expansion + +Foundry is the commercial-platform product, deployed by major airlines, financial institutions, health systems, and energy companies for internal data integration. Foundry represented Palantir's pivot from a government-only contractor to a dual government-and-commercial business, and accounts for a growing share of revenue. The same ontology architecture that powers Gotham is applied to corporate data silos (supply chain, customer records, sensor feeds), with the commercial revenue subsidizing the lower-margin government work and reducing the company's dependence on any single federal client.[^1] + +The company took its initial public offering in September 2020 via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange rather than a traditional underwritten IPO. The company's early public filings emphasized its rejection of conventional corporate-governance norms, including a dual-class share structure that consolidated control in the founders.[^1] + +### The Israel Strategic Partnership + +In January 2024, Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the [[Israeli Ministry of Defense]] to supply technology for "war-related missions" during the [[Gaza war]], following a visit to Israel by Karp and Thiel. The official Palantir statement reads: "We have agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply Palantir technology to help the country's war effort." [[Bloomberg]] reported the partnership on January 12, 2024, and [[Calcalist]] confirmed the defense-ministry relationship.[^5] + +Gotham is marketed on Palantir's own website as supporting soldiers with an "AI-powered kill chain," integrating target identification and targeting capabilities. Karp publicly told [[CNBC]] that the company's technology is being used in the Middle East war. Multiple reports (including [[Middle East Eye]]) link Palantir's Gotham platform to Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. [[Jeremy Corbyn]] criticized the UK government's 240 million pound Palantir contract for NHS data work in light of the Israeli partnership.[^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For Palantir corporate history, products, and client base, see primary corporate filings (SEC EDGAR, Form S-1 filed September 2020 for the direct listing) and the company's annual reports at investors.palantir.com. +[^2]: Lonsdale's account of the Palantir founding and his role as founding engineer is documented in his own writing and in contemporaneous Silicon Valley press; synthesized here. +[^3]: ICE FALCON contract documented through EPIC v. ICE FOIA litigation (https://epic.org/documents/epic-v-ice-palantir-databases/) and ICE contract HSCETC-15-C-00001 (https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/contracts/palantirTechHSCETC15C00001.pdf). For the smartphone raid app, see WNYC (https://www.wnyc.org/story/palantir-directly-powers-ice-workplace-raids-emails-show/). For ImmigrationOS, see Immigration Policy Tracking Project (https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-palantir-awarded-30-million-to-build-immigrationos-surveillance-platform-for-ice/). For the ACLU analysis, see https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup. For the Amnesty International briefing, see https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Amnest-International-Palantir-Briefing-Report-092520_Final.pdf. +[^4]: For the ELITE neighborhood-targeting app, see *404 Media* reporting. For the American Immigration Council analysis, see https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/. +[^5]: "Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech." *Bloomberg,* January 12, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-israel-agree-to-strategic-partnership-for-battle-tech ; "Palantir supplying Israel with technology to help in war effort." *Calcalist CTech.* https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rymy7ret6 ; "Corbyn slams UK for deal with Israel-linked US tech giant Palantir." *Middle East Eye.* https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/corbyn-slams-uk-ps240m-deal-israeli-military-linked-tech-giant-palantir diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal Mafia.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal Mafia.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..01f2fdbc --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal Mafia.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - PayPalMafia + - SiliconValley + - PayPal + - PeterThiel + - ElonMusk + - ReidHoffman + - MaxLevchin +alias: + - PayPal Mafia +summary: "The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of PayPal who, after the company's 2002 sale to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead the subsequent generation of Silicon Valley companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, Tesla, SpaceX, and the convening network Dialog." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of [[PayPal]] who, after the company's 2002 sale to [[eBay]] for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead much of the subsequent generation of [[Silicon Valley]] companies. The cohort acquired the "Mafia" label as a recognizable social and commercial network whose members sit on each other's boards, invest in each other's ventures, and convene, through [[Dialog]], in the same off-the-record settings. Six members of the network appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster, and the documented commercial, convening, ideological, and political infrastructure of the [[Thiel Influence Network]] runs substantially through the PayPal Mafia cohort.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The PayPal Period (1998-2002) + +[[Peter Thiel]] founded Confinity in 1998 to develop security software for handheld devices, pivoting into the person-to-person payments product that became PayPal. Confinity merged with [[Elon Musk]]'s X.com in 2000 to form PayPal, with Thiel as chief executive and Musk as the largest shareholder. The merger resolved a direct competition between the two companies that had produced a mutually destructive customer-acquisition war. The company went public in February 2002 and was acquired by eBay in October 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars. The exit dispersed a cohort of founders and early engineers, each capitalized at levels that permitted the founding of the subsequent generation of consumer-internet, payments, and defense-technology companies.[^1][^3] + +The anti-fraud data architecture that Thiel and [[Max Levchin]] built at PayPal was the technical foundation of the subsequent Palantir Technologies government-data-fusion platform. The PayPal system integrated credit-card transaction data, user-behavior signals, and network-graph analytics to identify fraudulent accounts in real time. The same architecture, applied to intelligence and law-enforcement data sources, became the [[Palantir Gotham|Palantir Gotham]] ontology approach. The documented lineage from PayPal fraud detection to Palantir government data fusion is the technical continuity between the two companies.[^1][^3] + +### The Principal Members and Their Subsequent Ventures + +Max Levchin was PayPal's chief technology officer and cofounder. Levchin subsequently founded [[Affirm]] (the buy-now-pay-later lender, taken public in 2021), served on the boards of [[Yelp]] and [[Evernote]], and established himself as the technical conscience of the PayPal Mafia cohort. Levchin's anti-fraud architecture patent portfolio underlies portions of the subsequent payments-technology industry. + +[[Reid Hoffman]] served as executive vice president and a founding board member, responsible for external relations and partnerships. Hoffman subsequently founded [[LinkedIn]] (2002, before the eBay sale closed), took it public in 2011, sold it to [[Microsoft]] for 26.2 billion dollars in 2016, and joined [[Greylock Partners|Greylock]] as a general partner in 2009. Hoffman's politics diverge from the Thiel-Musk Republican alignment: he has been a prominent [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] donor supporting [[Joe Biden]] and [[Kamala Harris]]. His documented [[Jeffrey Epstein|Epstein]] relationship (the image-rehabilitation apology, the 2015 dinner) places a Democratic-aligned PayPal Mafia principal inside the same post-conviction Epstein network as the Republican-aligned Thiel.[^2] + +Elon Musk founded X.com (the precursor to PayPal) and was PayPal's largest shareholder before and after the Confinity merger. Musk subsequently founded [[SpaceX]] (2002), joined [[Tesla, Inc.|Tesla]] as lead investor and chairman in 2004 (later chief executive), and acquired [[X (social media)|X (formerly Twitter)]] in 2022. Musk's documented [[Vladimir Putin|Putin]] contact channel (since late 2022, per the [[Wall Street Journal]]), the [[Jonathan Buma|Buma]]-documented GRU targeting of Musk, the [[Igor Kurganov|Kurganov]] infiltration, and the [[NLRB Data Exfiltration|NLRB data exfiltration]] through [[Department of Government Efficiency|DOGE]] all place Musk at the intersection of the PayPal Mafia commercial network and the documented Russian-intelligence and federal-data-access questions.[^2][^4] + +[[David Sacks]] served as chief operating officer. Sacks subsequently founded [[Yammer]] (acquired by Microsoft in 2012), produced the film *[[Thank You for Smoking|Thank You for Smoking]]*, and served in the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration as the White House [[AI and cryptocurrency|AI and cryptocurrency]] czar, formally the Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency. Sacks hosted the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]], which became a documented media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period.[^5] + +[[Ken Howery]] served as chief financial officer and subsequently cofounded [[Founders Fund]] with Thiel and [[Luke Nosek]]. Howery served as the [[United States Ambassador to Sweden|U.S. Ambassador to Sweden]] during the first Trump administration (2019-2021), receiving a formal diplomatic appointment through the Thiel-Trump relationship. + +Luke Nosek was a founding team member and subsequently a Founders Fund partner. Nosek sits on the SpaceX board, maintaining a formal board role at a Musk company across the post-PayPal period. + +[[Roelof Botha]] served as chief financial officer and subsequently joined [[Sequoia Capital]] as a partner. Botha's Sequoia portfolio includes [[YouTube]] (where he facilitated the Google acquisition), [[Square]] (the payments company, now [[Block (company)|Block]]), and [[Unity Technologies]]. Botha represents the PayPal Mafia cohort's penetration of the broader venture-capital establishment through Sequoia, the firm historically dominant in Silicon Valley venture investing. + +[[Keith Rabois]] served in an executive role and subsequently held positions at Founders Fund, [[OpenStore]], and PayPal-adjacent ventures. Rabois has been a documented intermediary between the PayPal Mafia cohort and the broader [[Khosla Ventures|Khosla Ventures]] and Founders Fund networks. + +[[Jeremy Stoppelman]] subsequently cofounded Yelp. [[Chad Hurley]], [[Steve Chen]], and [[Jawed Karim]] were early PayPal engineers who subsequently cofounded YouTube, which [[Google]] acquired for 1.65 billion dollars in 2006.[^1][^2] + +### The 2016 Trump Campaign and Mercer Money + +The PayPal Mafia cohort's political activity converged on the 2016 Trump campaign through Thiel's endorsement and the [[Mercer family|Mercer family]] connection. The Mercers funded [[Breitbart|Breitbart News]] (through which [[Steve Bannon|Steve Bannon]] operated), [[Cambridge Analytica|Cambridge Analytica]] (the data-targeting firm), and the pro-Trump super PACs. Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, donated over one million dollars to Trump-supporting efforts, and served on the transition executive committee. The documented convergence of the Thiel commercial network ([[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]], Founders Fund) with the Mercer political network (Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica) through the Trump campaign is the political instance of the PayPal Mafia cohort's federal-power exercise.[^1][^3] + +The cohort's internal political divergence has been documented across the 2016-2025 period. Hoffman has been the principal Democratic-aligned member, funding Democratic candidates and opposing Trump. Musk moved from apolitical to Republican-aligned across 2022-2024, acquiring X and shifting its content moderation toward the Republican position. Sacks moved into the formal Trump administration. Thiel funded the [[JD Vance]] and [[Blake Masters]] Senate campaigns and brokered the Vance vice-presidential selection. The documented divergence within the cohort has not fractured the commercial and convening relationships: Hoffman appears on the leaked 2026 Dialog roster alongside Thiel and Musk, placing the Democratic-aligned and Republican-aligned principals in the same off-the-record setting.[^1][^2] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: "Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations to MIT." *Axios,* September 12, 2019. https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations ; "Epstein's Silicon Valley ties extended beyond just Musk and Gates." *CNBC,* February 9, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/tech-leaders-epstein-records-silicon-valley-sergey-brin-thiel-sinofsky-reid-hoffman-musk-gates.html +[^3]: Founders Fund, "Portfolio," documenting the firm's Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and Affirm positions; the firm was founded in 2005 by Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek. https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/ +[^4]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia +[^5]: "Statement by President-elect Donald J. Trump Announcing the Appointment of David O. Sacks as 'White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.'" December 5, 2024, archived at The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-president-elect-donald-j-trump-announcing-the-appointment-david-o-sacks-white diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Per Aspera Policy.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Per Aspera Policy.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4b1449e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Per Aspera Policy.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - PerAsperaPolicy + - DarkMoney + - 501c4 + - PeterThiel + - JDVance + - RepublicanParty + - PoliticalSpending +alias: + - Per Aspera Policy +summary: "Per Aspera Policy is a Thiel-tied 501(c)(4) dark-money organization that steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the Protect Ohio Values super PAC supporting JD Vance's 2022 Ohio Senate primary alongside Thiel's direct contributions, documented by OpenSecrets in February 2022." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +[[Per Aspera Policy|Per Aspera Policy]] is a [[501(c)(4)|501(c)(4)]] social-welfare organization tied to [[Peter Thiel]] that steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC supporting the [[JD Vance]] 2022 Ohio Senate primary campaign, alongside Thiel's approximately fifteen million dollars in direct super-PAC contributions. [[OpenSecrets]] reported the transfer in February 2022 as part of its analysis of dark-money spending in the 2022 election cycle. The 501(c)(4) form permits political spending without donor disclosure, which is the structural feature that distinguishes the Per Aspera vehicle from the disclosed super-PAC spending.[^1][^2] + +### The 501(c)(4) Structure and the Disclosure Gap + +501(c)(4) organizations are designated under the [[Internal Revenue Code|Internal Revenue Code]] as social-welfare organizations. They are permitted to engage in political activity, including independent expenditure in support of or opposition to candidates, without disclosing their donors to the public. The only disclosure required is to the [[Internal Revenue Service|IRS]] on the annual Form 990, and even that disclosure is subject to redaction for donor-identity protection. The structural consequence is that a 501(c)(4) can transfer funds to a super PAC, which must disclose its receipts, without revealing the original source of the funds.[^1][^3] + +The Per Aspera-to-Protect Ohio Values transfer follows this structure. The super PAC disclosed that it received approximately 200,000 dollars from Per Aspera Policy. Per Aspera Policy did not disclose its donors. The identity of the individuals or entities that funded the 200,000 dollar transfer beyond the Per Aspera vehicle is not part of the public record.[^1] + +### The Leonard Leo Parallel + +The Per Aspera Policy vehicle operates in the same 501(c)(4) dark-money ecosystem as the [[Leonard Leo|Leonard Leo]]-linked vehicles (the [[Judicial Crisis Network|Judicial Crisis Network]] / [[Concord Fund|Concord Fund]] network) that directed approximately one billion dollars into the conservative judicial-selection project. The JCN brought in nearly 48.1 million dollars in a single reporting period to support the [[Neil Gorsuch|Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh|Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett|Barrett]] confirmation campaigns, per [[CREW|Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington]]. The Leo-linked and Thiel-linked vehicles use the same 501(c)(4) structure to fund political and institutional activities whose donor base is not publicly traceable.[^2][^4] + +The Thiel and Leo networks share the [[Teneo Network|Teneo Network]] institutional terrain through [[Evan Baehr]], who founded Teneo in 2008 and who moved in the Thiel orbit before the founding. Both networks fund through 501(c)(4) vehicles that transfer to super PACs (the Per Aspera-to-Protect Ohio Values transfer mirrors the JCN-to-confirmation-campaign transfer), and both operate through the Teneo Network for the broader institutional-placement function. The [[Senate Judiciary Committee|Senate Judiciary Committee]] under Chairman [[Dick Durbin|Dick Durbin]] sought Leo's records and testimony on the JCN network; Leo declined to comply.[^2][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ +[^2]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023, documenting Leo's Teneo Network chairmanship and the shared conservative dark-money terrain. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents +[^3]: Internal Revenue Service, "Social Welfare Organizations" (Section 501(c)(4)), describing the political-activity and donor-disclosure rules. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/social-welfare-organizations +[^4]: "Vance surges to victory in Ohio's record-breaking Senate primary." *OpenSecrets,* May 2022, documenting the Thiel-funded Protect Ohio Values super PAC spending. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/05/vance-surges-to-victory-in-ohios-record-breaking-senate-primary diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Pioneer Fund.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Pioneer Fund.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4b4fc170 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Pioneer Fund.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - PioneerFund + - Eugenics + - RaceScience + - HumanBiodiversity + - DarkMoney +summary: "The Pioneer Fund is a New York foundation established in 1937 to promote eugenics and 'race betterment' that became the principal financier of race-and-intelligence research in the United States, funding many of the scholars cited in The Bell Curve and the journal Mankind Quarterly." +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Pioneer Fund is a foundation established in [[New York City|New York]] in 1937 to promote eugenics and what its founders called "race betterment," which over the following decades became the leading financier of race-and-intelligence research in the United States. It funded many of the scholars whose work underlies the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] current, including thirteen researchers cited in [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve*, and it bankrolled the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]] and the [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]]. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classifies it as a hate group.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Mission + +The fund was created by the textile heir [[Wickliffe Draper]], with the eugenicist [[Harry Laughlin]], an architect of American sterilization laws and an admirer of [[Nazi Germany|Nazi]] race policy, as its first president. Its charter aimed at "racial improvement" through the encouragement of procreation among descendants of the original colonial-stock population and the study of heredity and "race betterment." In its early decades it also funded efforts to resist desegregation and to promote the repatriation of black Americans.[^1][^3] + +The fund was incorporated in New York on March 11, 1937. Its five original directors were Draper, Laughlin, the demographer [[Frederick Osborn]], the lawyer Malcolm Donald, and [[John Marshall Harlan II]], the future Associate Justice of the [[Supreme Court of the United States]]. Draper had toured [[Germany]] in 1935 and met leading Third Reich eugenicists, and the fund's founding charter limited its procreation incentives to people "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Laughlin had received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his contributions to German racial science.[^5][^6] + +### Funding Race Science + +From the postwar period onward the fund became the central money source for hereditarian psychology and the race-and-IQ literature. Its grantees included the psychologists [[Arthur Jensen]], [[William Shockley]], [[Hans Eysenck]], and [[Richard Lynn]], and the fund was later led by [[J. Philippe Rushton]], a psychologist known for claims of a racial hierarchy of intelligence. Murray acknowledged in the afterword to *The Bell Curve* that he had cited thirteen Pioneer Fund grantees. The fund also supported anti-immigration organizations, linking the eugenics-research network to the immigration-restriction politics promoted by figures such as [[John Tanton]] and [[Steve Sailer]].[^2][^4] + +The New York lawyer [[Harry F. Weyher Jr.]] ran the fund as president from 1958 to 2002, a 44-year tenure during which he directed more than $3.5 million to race-and-intelligence researchers; his interest in the fund grew from its opposition to the 1954 *[[Brown v. Board of Education]]* desegregation ruling, and Pioneer money underwrote legal and research efforts to resist integration in the 1960s. When Weyher died in March 2002 Rushton became president, and on Rushton's death in October 2012 Lynn succeeded him, routing further grants through his Ulster Institute for Social Research. The historian [[William H. Tucker]] documented this funding chain in his 2002 book *The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund*.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the 1937 founding, Wickliffe Draper, Harry Laughlin, and the hate-group classification. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/pioneer-fund/ +[^2]: "Pioneer Fund," SourceWatch, on the fund's grantees, the Bell Curve citations, and Mankind Quarterly. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund +[^3]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve.* Free Press, 1994, afterword acknowledging the Pioneer Fund-funded sources. +[^4]: "London Conference on Intelligence exposes link between academic promotion of eugenics and Conservative right," TruePublica, 2018, on the Pioneer Fund, the Ulster Institute, and Mankind Quarterly network. https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/london-conference-intelligence-exposes-link-academic-promotion-eugenics-conservative-right/ +[^5]: "Pioneer Fund," SourceWatch, on the March 11, 1937 incorporation, the five original directors including John Marshall Harlan II, and the colonial-stock charter language. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund +[^6]: Tucker, William H. "Toward a racial abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the origins of The Pioneer Fund," *Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,* 2002, on Draper's 1935 Germany visit and Laughlin's Heidelberg degree. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12115787/ +[^7]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Harry Weyher's 1958-2002 presidency, the $3.5 million in grants, the Brown v. Board opposition, and Rushton's succession. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund/ +[^8]: Tucker, William H. *The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.* University of Illinois Press, 2002. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Safe Superintelligence.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Safe Superintelligence.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cb15987e --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Safe Superintelligence.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SafeSuperintelligence + - IlyaSutskever + - ArtificialIntelligence + - AISafety + - VentureCapital +alias: + - SSI + - Safe Superintelligence Inc. +summary: "Safe Superintelligence is the AI lab Ilya Sutskever cofounded in June 2024 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, built to pursue a single safe-superintelligence goal with no commercial product, which raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion valuation and later 2 billion at a 32-billion valuation before Meta poached Gross and Sutskever became chief executive." +location: "Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an artificial-intelligence research company founded in June 2024 by [[Ilya Sutskever]], the former chief scientist of [[OpenAI]], together with the investor and former Apple AI executive [[Daniel Gross]] and the former OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy. The company was announced with a one-sentence mission, that it had "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence," and was structured deliberately to ship no commercial products until that goal is reached, insulating its research from the revenue pressures that shaped OpenAI and [[Anthropic]]. It operates from offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the No-Product Model + +Sutskever left OpenAI on May 14, 2024, months after the November 2023 board crisis in which he had voted to remove and then reinstate chief executive [[Sam Altman]], and announced SSI roughly a month later. His cofounder Daniel Gross had founded the personal-assistant startup Cue, sold it to [[Apple]] in 2013, run AI efforts there, and become a partner at [[Y Combinator]] before partnering with the former [[GitHub]] chief executive Nat Friedman to run the venture fund NFDG; Daniel Levy had led the optimization team under Sutskever at OpenAI. In its launch statement the founders framed the single-goal structure as a feature, writing that the company's "singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures."[^1][^3] + +The company has published no products, papers, or model releases of note, and its website functions as little more than the founding statement. The deliberate absence of a product made SSI an unusual fundraising case: investors backed a research program with no revenue, no public benchmarks, and an explicitly open-ended timeline, on the strength of Sutskever's record and the safety-first thesis.[^2][^4] + +### Funding Rounds and Investors + +In September 2024 SSI raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion-dollar valuation, in a round whose backers included [[Andreessen Horowitz]], Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel, and NFDG, the fund run by Gross and Friedman. The three-month-old company had no product, yet the round placed it among the most richly valued AI startups of its cohort. Reporting in early 2025 indicated a far larger follow-on, and in April 2025 the company was reported to have raised an additional 2 billion dollars at a 32-billion-dollar valuation, led by Greenoaks, which put in a reported 500 million dollars, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and DST Global.[^4][^5] + +Among the later backers were [[Google|Alphabet]] and [[Nvidia]], both strategic investors with stakes in AI infrastructure, and Google Cloud became a major compute provider to the lab, supplying it with Tensor Processing Units.[^4][^6] + +### The Meta Approach and Sutskever as CEO + +In June 2025 [[Meta]] Platforms, building its superintelligence division under [[Mark Zuckerberg]], attempted to acquire SSI outright. Sutskever rebuffed the approach. Meta instead hired Gross, who had been SSI's chief executive, along with his NFDG partner Nat Friedman, in a transaction in which Meta took a stake in the NFDG fund; Gross departed SSI on June 29, 2025 to work on AI products at Meta. On July 3, 2025 Sutskever announced that he had become chief executive of SSI, with Daniel Levy as president and the technical staff continuing to report to him.[^7][^8] + +Sutskever ruled out any sale of the company, writing that "we are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through. We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence." Gross, for his part, said as he left that he expected "miracles" from the lab he had cofounded. The episode left Sutskever as both the public face and the operating head of a lab that had been built around his name and continued to hold its 32-billion-dollar valuation without a product.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Safe Superintelligence Inc.," company launch statement, June 19, 2024, on the founders, the "one goal and one product" mission, and the no-distraction business model. https://ssi.inc/ +[^2]: "Safe Superintelligence Raises $2 Billion at $32 Billion Valuation Despite No Public Product," VC Tavern, 2025, on the no-product model and the placeholder website. https://vctavern.com/safe-superintelligence-raises-2-billion-at-32-billion-valuation-despite-no-public-product/ +[^3]: "Daniel Gross Investments," Hustle Fund, on Gross's founding of Cue, the Apple acquisition, his Y Combinator partnership, and the NFDG fund with Nat Friedman. https://www.hustlefund.vc/post/angel-squad-daniel-gross-investments-the-israeli-american-who-built-a-supercomputer-for-ai-startups-before-anyone-else-thought-to +[^4]: "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B," *TechCrunch,* April 12, 2025, on the September 2024 round, the April 2025 round led by Greenoaks, and the Alphabet, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and DST Global backers. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b +[^5]: "AI's Big Day: Startup Safe Superintelligence Raises $1B At Reported $5B Valuation," *Crunchbase News,* September 4, 2024, on the 1-billion September 2024 round at a 5-billion valuation with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/startup-safe-superintelligence-unicorn-raise/ +[^6]: "Alphabet, Nvidia bet on OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's $32B AI startup," *TipRanks,* 2025, on the Alphabet and Nvidia strategic stakes and the Google Cloud TPU compute arrangement. https://www.tipranks.com/news/alphabet-nvidia-bet-on-openai-co-founder-sutskevers-32b-ai-startup +[^7]: "Ilya Sutskever is CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta hired Gross," *CNBC,* July 3, 2025, on the Meta acquisition attempt, Gross's June 29 departure, and Sutskever becoming CEO with the "we know what to do" statement. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html +[^8]: "Meta tried to buy Safe Superintelligence, hired CEO Daniel Gross," *CNBC,* June 19, 2025, on Meta's NFDG stake, the hiring of Gross and Friedman, and Gross's "miracles" remark. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-superintelligence-hired-ceo-daniel-gross.html diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/SafeGraph.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/SafeGraph.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6874ba63 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/SafeGraph.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SafeGraph + - Surveillance + - DataBroker + - LocationData + - CDC + - AurenHoffman +alias: + - SafeGraph Inc. +summary: "SafeGraph is a location-data brokerage founded in 2014 by Auren Hoffman that aggregates and resells mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications, and whose 2020 contract to supply cell-phone location data to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surfaced the warrantless availability of commercial location data to federal agencies." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +SafeGraph is an American location-data brokerage founded in 2014 by [[Auren Hoffman]] that aggregates and resells mobile-device location pings collected from smartphone applications. The company packages the data into datasets used in academic research, real-estate analysis, retail-site selection, and advertising, and has repeatedly drawn scrutiny over the granularity of its data and its accessibility to government clients. Hoffman's role as SafeGraph's founder and as chairman of the secret society [[Dialog]] places the firm at the intersection of the consumer-data-brokerage industry and the Thiel-organized elite-convening network exposed in the June 2026 Dialog leak.[^1] + +A location-data broker collects, cleans, and resells the GPS traces that smartphone applications generate as a condition of their operation; the broker's value is in the aggregation and the joins. When the same firm sells that aggregated data to a federal agency for warrantless use, the distinction between commercial surveillance and state surveillance collapses, because the data is identical and the legal authority differs only in the procurement channel. + +### Data Sourcing and Products + +SafeGraph aggregates location data purchased from smartphone-application developers whose apps request location permissions from their users. The applications, which span weather, shopping, local-news, and utility categories, collect continuous GPS traces from the devices of users who have granted location access, and sell those traces to data brokers including SafeGraph. The broker deduplicates, anonymizes (in the sense that direct identifiers are stripped, though the traces themselves are unique to a device), and packages the data into products: SafeGraph Places (point-of-interest and foot-traffic data), SafeGraph Patterns (aggregated device-movement patterns), and SafeGraph Spend (consumer spending tied to location).[^2] + +A continuous GPS trace is a de-facto identifier: the location of a device at 3 a.m. is the location of its owner's home, and the home is the person. Academic and journalistic research has repeatedly demonstrated that "anonymized" location traces can be re-identified to specific individuals, and SafeGraph's datasets have been the subject of published re-identification studies. The company's position has been that its aggregation and contractual use restrictions address the privacy concern; its critics' position has been that the re-identification risk is intrinsic to the data type.[^2] + +### The CDC Contract and Federal Location-Data Procurement + +In 2020 the U.S. [[Centers for Disease Control and Prevention|CDC]] contracted with SafeGraph for cell-phone location data to monitor compliance with [[COVID-19]] pandemic movement restrictions. The contract, reported in *The Wall Street Journal* and elsewhere, made publicly visible what had been an open practice in the federal procurement of commercial location data: agencies including the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and components of the intelligence community purchase commercially collected location data from brokers rather than obtaining it through legal process, because the data is offered for sale on the open market and its purchase is not subject to the warrant requirement that would attach to compelled disclosure.[^3] + +The legal framing is the [[third-party doctrine]]: data voluntarily disclosed to a third party (the application developer, the broker) loses the Fourth Amendment protection it would have if held by the user. The CDC contract, by surfacing the practice, drew attention to the broader federal procurement of commercial location data and to the specific role of SafeGraph as a supplier. The 2026 Dialog leak renewed scrutiny of the same firm because its founder, Hoffman, chairs the off-the-record gathering whose government-side attendees include the congressional oversight principals responsible for the agencies that buy SafeGraph's data.[^1] + +### The Dialog Intersection + +The 2026 Dialog leak placed Hoffman as chairman of the convening network whose registrants include sitting U.S. senators, governors, military commanders, and technology executives, while SafeGraph, the firm he founded and chaired, supplies location data to federal agencies. The same individual runs the convening at which the regulators and the regulated meet off the record, and runs the firm whose data product the regulators procure. The pathway is not alleged to be corruptly used; the 2026 leak is the first primary record of the membership across which the overlap occurs.[^1] + +[[Palantir Technologies]] (intelligence and law-enforcement data fusion), [[LiveRamp]] (identity resolution), and SafeGraph (location data) are firms whose commercial and government uses share a technical substrate. Their principals sit in the same off-the-record room as the government clients, and all three sit within the Dialog membership.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: For SafeGraph's products, data sourcing, and the academic re-identification literature on anonymized location data, see the company's published documentation and the published re-identification studies (e.g., de Montjoye et al., *Nature Scientific Reports,* 2013) on location-trace uniqueness. +[^3]: For the CDC contract and the federal procurement of commercial location data in 2020, see *The Wall Street Journal* and *Vice Motherboard* reporting on federal agency purchases of SafeGraph and rival broker data during the COVID-19 pandemic. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Schmidt Futures.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Schmidt Futures.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..33ab42aa --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Schmidt Futures.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SchmidtFutures + - SchmidtSciences + - EricSchmidt + - Philanthropy + - ArtificialIntelligence +alias: + - Schmidt Futures + - Schmidt Sciences +summary: "Schmidt Futures is the philanthropic venture Eric and Wendy Schmidt launched in 2017 to fund science and technology talent, which paid the salaries of White House science staff before consolidating its core programs into Schmidt Sciences in 2024." +location: "New York, New York" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Schmidt Futures is the philanthropic venture launched in 2017 by [[Eric Schmidt]], the former [[Google]] chief executive, and his wife [[Wendy Schmidt]] to identify and fund talent in science and technology. It is structured as an initiative of Futures Action Network LLC, a Schmidt-controlled entity, and is funded chiefly through the [[Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation]], a private foundation; it is distinct from the older [[Schmidt Family Foundation]], which runs the couple's environmental and climate grantmaking. In 2024 Schmidt Futures consolidated its core scientific work into a new charitable organization, [[Schmidt Sciences]].[^1][^2] + +### Founding and Structure + +Schmidt Futures grew out of the Schmidt family's earlier philanthropic operations, which Eric Braverman had directed before helping launch and lead the new venture as its chief executive; Braverman had previously run the [[Clinton Foundation]] from 2013 to 2015. Rather than a conventional foundation, Schmidt Futures was set up as a "philanthropic initiative" of a limited-liability company, an arrangement that gave it flexibility to make grants, investments, and program-related spending while disclosing less than a traditional nonprofit. Its money flows largely from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, the private foundation that holds the couple's charitable assets for this work.[^1][^3] + +The venture described its mission as betting on exceptional people early, funding what it called "moonshots" and talent pipelines across the sciences, artificial-intelligence research, and public policy. Its spending reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars across its programs, and Eric Schmidt repeatedly framed it as venture-style philanthropy aimed at returns measured in scientific breakthroughs and policy influence rather than money.[^1][^3] + +### The Programs + +Schmidt Futures ran a cluster of fellowship and talent programs. Rise, launched in 2019 as the anchor of a one-billion-dollar commitment by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in partnership with the [[Rhodes Trust]], identifies teenagers worldwide for lifelong support. The AI2050 program, conceived and cochaired by Schmidt and the technologist James Manyika, committed 125 million dollars over five years to researchers working to ensure society benefits from [[Artificial Intelligence]]. The venture also ran the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, quantum and science fellowships, and helped establish Convergent Research to build "focused research organizations."[^2][^4] + +These programs placed Schmidt money inside major universities and research institutions worldwide, including the [[University of Cambridge]], the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], and [[Stanford University]], through fellowships, named postdoctoral positions, and research funding. By concentrating on early-career talent, the venture built durable relationships with scientists and institutions across AI and the physical sciences.[^2][^4] + +### The White House Science Office + +A March 2022 Politico investigation reported that Schmidt Futures had paid the salaries of staff working inside the White House [[Office of Science and Technology Policy]] under its director [[Eric Lander]]. Its chief innovation officer [[Tom Kalil]] stayed on the Schmidt Futures payroll for four months while serving ostensibly as an unpaid consultant at the office, and the venture indirectly covered the salary of the office's chief of staff Marc Aidinoff for roughly six weeks. The office's general counsel Rachel Wallace raised significant ethical concerns about the arrangement given Schmidt's financial interests overlapping the office's portfolio.[^5][^6] + +Subsequent reporting, including by the [[Tech Transparency Project]], described a broader pattern in which Schmidt Futures money reached more than twenty science-policy positions across the [[Joe Biden]] administration, in part by routing fellows through outside groups such as the Federation of American Scientists and into agencies including the Department of Energy. Eric Schmidt called the original salary report "largely false." Senators including Chuck Grassley wrote to the science office and the General Services Administration seeking records on the personnel arrangements.[^5][^6] + +### Consolidation into Schmidt Sciences + +In 2024 Schmidt Futures folded its core scientific work into Schmidt Sciences, a new nonprofit founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and led by the computer scientist [[Stuart Feldman]] as president and chief scientist. Schmidt Sciences organized its work into centers spanning AI and advanced computing, astrophysics and space, biosciences, climate, and cross-science programs, and it carried forward the AI2050 fellowships, naming new cohorts of senior and early-career fellows in 2024 and awarding millions of dollars in AI research grants in 2025.[^2][^7] + +In 2025 Schmidt Sciences announced a roughly 10-million-dollar venture to fund scientific research into AI safety problems, extending the couple's reach from talent funding into the technical AI-safety field. The Rise program continued under the joint Schmidt and Rhodes Trust partnership, while the rebrand separated the science programs from the Schmidt Futures name that had been damaged by the White House controversy.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Schmidt Futures," InfluenceWatch, on the 2017 founding by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the structure as an initiative of Futures Action Network LLC funded by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, chief executive Eric Braverman, and the program roster. https://www.influencewatch.org/organization/schmidt-futures/ +[^2]: "About" and "AI2050," Schmidt Sciences, on the 2024 establishment as the successor to Schmidt Futures' scientific programs, the 125-million-dollar AI2050 commitment over five years cochaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, the 2025 AI-safety research venture, and the founders Eric and Wendy Schmidt. https://www.schmidtsciences.org/about/ +[^3]: "Eric Braverman," InfluenceWatch, on his Clinton Foundation tenure (2013-2015), his leadership of Schmidt family philanthropy, and his role launching and running Schmidt Futures. https://www.influencewatch.org/person/eric-braverman/ +[^4]: "Second Cohort of AI2050 Senior Fellows Named By Schmidt Futures," Stony Brook University AI Innovation Institute, on AI2050's cochairs Eric Schmidt and James Manyika and the program's fellowship structure; and "Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust," on the Rise program as anchor of the one-billion-dollar commitment. https://ai.stonybrook.edu/about-us/News/second-cohort-ai2050-senior-fellows-named-schmidt-futures +[^5]: "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says story alleging his foundation indirectly paid White House science staffers is 'largely false,'" CNBC, March 29, 2022, on the Politico report, Tom Kalil's four months on the payroll, the six weeks of Marc Aidinoff's salary, Rachel Wallace's concerns, and Schmidt's denial. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-responds-to-white-house-related-allegations.html +[^6]: "How Eric Schmidt built an expansive AI influence operation," Politico (Alex Thompson), March 28, 2022, on the OSTP salary arrangements and the Schmidt-tied staffing of the science office. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/28/google-eric-schmidt-white-house-00020712 +[^7]: "Schmidt Sciences awards $18M to researchers working to ensure AI benefits society," Schmidt Sciences, 2025, on the AI2050 fellow awards, the center structure, president Stuart Feldman, and the continuation of programs after the 2024 consolidation. https://www.schmidtsciences.org/2025-ai2050-fellows-announcement/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Seasteading Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Seasteading Institute.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9a8dff93 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Seasteading Institute.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Seasteading + - PeterThiel + - PatriFriedman + - SovereignIndividual + - Libertarianism + - Offshore + - FrenchPolynesia +alias: + - The Seasteading Institute + - TSI +summary: "The Seasteading Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cofounded in 2008 by Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman (grandson of economist Milton Friedman) to establish autonomous, sovereign floating cities on the ocean as a physical instantiation of the sovereign-individual thesis, which pursued a floating-city project in French Polynesia before the territorial government cut ties in 2018." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +The Seasteading Institute is a [[501(c)(3)|501(c)(3)]] nonprofit cofounded in 2008 by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Patri Friedman|Patri Friedman]] (the grandson of the economist [[Milton Friedman|Milton Friedman]]) to establish autonomous, sovereign floating communities on the ocean. Thiel invested approximately 1.7 million dollars in the institute before resigning from its board in 2011. The institute pursued a floating-city project in [[French Polynesia|French Polynesia]] that reached a tentative territorial-government agreement around 2017 before the government cut ties in 2018 amid public backlash over what critics characterized as tech-billionaire colonization.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Sovereign-Individual Thesis Physicalized + +The seasteading project is the physical instantiation of the [[The Sovereign Individual|Sovereign Individual]] thesis that Thiel has publicly cited as prophetic. The 1997 [[William Rees-Mogg|Rees-Mogg]] / [[James Dale Davidson|Davidson]] book argues that encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction. The seasteading project extends the thesis from the financial-jurisdictional escape (the book's focus) to the territorial escape: the construction of physical communities on the ocean outside the jurisdiction of any existing state.[^4][^5] + +Friedman brought the ideological frame through his family lineage. The grandson of Milton Friedman (the [[Chicago school of economics|Chicago school]] monetarist) and the son of [[David Friedman|David D. Friedman]] (the anarcho-capitalist theorist and author of *The Machinery of Freedom*), Friedman's seasteading proposal was the application of the family's anarcho-capitalist position to the problem of territorial jurisdiction. The floating-city concept was designed to permit the kind of jurisdictional competition the Sovereign Individual thesis predicts, with each seastead operating under its own chosen legal regime.[^3][^6] + +### The Founding and the Thiel Investment + +Thiel and Friedman cofounded the Seasteading Institute in 2008. The *Cambridge Repository|Cambridge academic analysis* of seasteading documents the founding as a joint project of Friedman's policy framework and Thiel's capital. Thiel's initial investment was approximately 500,000 dollars, growing to approximately 1.7 million dollars cumulatively before his 2011 board resignation. The *Guardian* reported in January 2017 that Thiel's launch investment had made seasteading "the movement of the moment" in Silicon Valley libertarian circles.[^2][^3][^6] + +Thiel resigned from the Seasteading Institute board in 2011, coinciding with the period of his documented [[Jeffrey Epstein]] relationship and the founding of the [[Neoreaction]]-patronage engagement with [[Curtis Yarvin]]. The seasteading project's institutional form (the sovereign floating community outside territorial jurisdiction) and the neoreactionary argument ([[Neocameralism|neocameralism]]: the sovereign territory as joint-stock corporate property) are the physical and political versions of the same thesis about the obsolescence of territorial nation-states.[^4] + +### The French Polynesia Project + +The Seasteading Institute pursued a floating-city project in French Polynesia that reached a tentative agreement with the territorial government around 2017. The project proposed to build a pilot seastead in a sheltered lagoon under a special-economic-zone framework that would grant the seastead operational autonomy within French Polynesian territorial waters. [[Hawaii Public Radio|Hawaii Public Radio]] reported on the territorial government's agreement in January 2017, and the *Guardian* covered the proposal in detail.[^2][^7] + +The territorial government of French Polynesia cut ties with the Seasteading Institute in 2018 amid public backlash. *Business Insider* reported that the withdrawal was driven by local opposition to what critics characterized as tech-billionaire colonization, with the project framed as an external imposition on Polynesian territorial sovereignty rather than a voluntary partnership. The *Outline|Outline* covered the collapse under the headline "Tech bros told they're no longer allowed to colonize French Polynesia."[^1][^8] + +### Offshore Legal Escape + +Thiel obtained [[New Zealand]] citizenship in 2011 under an investor-visa provision without meeting the normal residency requirement, acquired a 193-hectare estate near [[Lake Wanaka]] in the South Island, and described New Zealand as "the future" in his citizenship application. The [[New York Times]] reported in 2018 that multiple Silicon Valley billionaires had acquired New Zealand properties as geographic insurance against systemic collapse.[^4][^9] + +The ideological root is the Sovereign Individual thesis that Thiel has publicly adopted. The 1997 Rees-Mogg / Davidson book argues that encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction. The seasteading project extends the thesis from financial escape to physical escape.[^4][^6][^9] + +Friedman's family lineage supplies the anarcho-capitalist frame: his grandfather Milton Friedman founded the Chicago school of economics monetarist tradition, and his father David D. Friedman wrote *The Machinery of Freedom* (1973), the foundational anarcho-capitalist text arguing that all government functions, including courts and police, can be replaced by competing private providers. The seasteading project applies the Friedman-family ideological program to the physical construction of autonomous ocean-surface communities, funded by Thiel's capital.[^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "French Polynesia Cuts Ties With Libertarian Seasteading Institute." *Business Insider,* March 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3 +[^2]: "Seasteading: tech leaders' plans for floating city trouble French Polynesia." *The Guardian,* January 2, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/02/seasteading-peter-thiel-french-polynesia +[^3]: "The Seasteading Institute." *Wikipedia.* For the founding, see also the Cambridge academic analysis of seasteading and international law. +[^4]: For the Sovereign Individual thesis and Thiel's adoption of it, see the The Sovereign Individual page. +[^5]: Rees-Mogg, William, and James Dale Davidson. *The Sovereign Individual.* Simon and Schuster, 1997. +[^6]: For Patri Friedman's family lineage (Milton Friedman, David D. Friedman) and the anarcho-capitalist ideological frame, see the published Friedman family biographical record. +[^7]: "Pacific News Minute: French Polynesia Agrees to 'SeaSteading' Proposal." *Hawaii Public Radio,* January 19, 2017. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/pacific-news-minute/2017-01-19/pacific-news-minute-french-polynesia-agrees-to-seasteading-proposal-to-build-a-floating-city +[^8]: "Tech bros told they're no longer allowed to colonize French Polynesia." *The Outline.* https://theoutline.com/post/3745/seasteading-institute-french-polynesia-peter-thiel +[^9]: For Thiel's New Zealand citizenship and the broader offshore-legal-escape pattern, see the contemporaneous press coverage of the New Zealand investor-visa disclosure. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Southern Trust Company.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Southern Trust Company.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5bf3d694 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Southern Trust Company.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - JeffreyEpstein + - VirginIslands + - SouthernTrust + - TaxFraud + - GovernmentCapture + - ShellCompany +summary: "Southern Trust Company was Jeffrey Epstein's U.S. Virgin Islands entity that obtained large territorial tax benefits by claiming to run a DNA-database and data-mining business the Virgin Islands later alleged it never actually conducted." +location: "St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Southern Trust Company was a [[U.S. Virgin Islands]] corporation controlled by [[Jeffrey Epstein]], formed around 2012 and 2013 as the successor to his earlier territorial entity [[Financial Trust Company]]. It applied to the [[Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority]] in October 2012 for benefits under the [[Economic Development Commission]] program and received a ten-year incentive package, on the representation that it would build a DNA-database and data-mining, or "informatics," business. A January 2020 civil enforcement complaint by the territory's [[Denise George|Attorney General]] alleged that the company conducted no such business and existed to fund Epstein's criminal activity and properties, and the 2022 settlement with his estate required repayment of roughly 80 million dollars in the benefits it had obtained.[^1][^2] + +### Formation and the Economic Development Commission Benefits + +Epstein's territorial operation began with Financial Trust Company, which he relocated to the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1996 and used as the principal company managing his wealth and client investments. Southern Trust Company followed roughly a decade and a half later. The company applied to the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority in October 2012 and received a package running from February 1, 2013 through January 31, 2023 that included a 90 percent exemption from income taxes and 100 percent exemptions from gross-receipts, excise, and withholding taxes.[^1][^3] + +To qualify, Southern Trust represented that it would operate a consulting service mining DNA and financial data for a global clientele, a database that, according to the application, would let pharmaceutical companies and physicians use Epstein's mathematical models to test drug protocols. The Economic Development Commission program conditions large tax reductions on a beneficiary maintaining a qualifying business and meeting employment and investment requirements in the territory. The Virgin Islands later alleged that the company never built or operated the represented informatics business.[^1][^3] + +The complaint and JPMorgan's later filings alleged that Southern Trust instead functioned as a conduit, processing payments to foreign women, covering credit cards, aircraft, and other instrumentalities, and compensating personnel within Epstein's network of entities. The same filings alleged that Epstein associates, including the office manager [[Cecile de Jongh]], wife of then-governor [[John de Jongh]], were employed by the company and worked to keep it in compliance so the benefits continued.[^1][^4] + +### The Fraud Allegation and the Settlement + +The January 2020 complaint, brought in the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands as Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein under the territory's Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, alleged that Southern Trust fraudulently obtained its tax benefits by misrepresenting its business to the Economic Development Authority. The Attorney General amended the action to add the estate co-executors [[Darren Indyke]] and [[Richard Kahn]], Southern Trust Company, and other Epstein-created entities as co-defendants.[^2][^5] + +On December 1, 2022 the territory announced a settlement with the Epstein estate for more than 105 million dollars in cash, plus half the proceeds of the sale of [[Little St. James]] and a payment of 450,000 dollars for environmental remediation at [[Great St. James]]. The settlement required the estate to return more than 80 million dollars in tax benefits that the territory said Southern Trust had obtained fraudulently to fund Epstein's criminal activity. The Attorney General Denise George stated that the settlement restored the faith of the people of the Virgin Islands that its laws would be enforced against those who break them.[^2][^6] + +The entity figured again in the territory's separate December 2022 suit against [[JPMorgan Chase]], which alleged that the bank serviced the Epstein network of companies, including Southern Trust and Financial Trust, while ignoring evidence of trafficking. That case settled in September 2023 for 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands, and the bank separately paid 290 million dollars to Epstein's victims. The tax benefits at issue were scheduled to expire on January 31, 2023, the same period in which the territory's enforcement actions concluded.[^4][^6] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "U.S.V.I. Sues JPMorgan Chase for Facilitating Epstein Trafficking." *Tax Notes* (reproducing the complaint), December 2022; Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y. 2022). +[^2]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate of Jeffrey Epstein and Co-Defendants for Over $105 Million." *Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice,* December 1, 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/ +[^3]: "JPMorgan: EDA had 'little to no diligence' over Epstein tax benefits." *Virgin Islands Daily News,* 2023. https://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/news/jpmorgan-eda-had-little-to-no-diligence-over-epstein-tax-benefits/article_1fe46263-1561-5ec7-b5c7-c395bdc91665.html +[^4]: "JPMorgan alleges wife of U.S. Virgin Islands' ex-governor aided Jeffrey Epstein's criminal activity." *NBC News,* May 24, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jpmorgan-alleges-ex-virgin-islands-first-lady-aided-jeffrey-epstein-rcna86365 +[^5]: Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, No. ST-20-CV-14 (V.I. Super. Ct., filed January 15, 2020), brought under the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 14 V.I.C. sections 600 to 614. +[^6]: "U.S. Virgin Islands reaches a $105M settlement with Jeffrey Epstein's estate." *NPR,* December 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140096222/jeffrey-epsteins-estate-reaches-a-105m-settlement-with-the-u-s-virgin-islands ; "Epstein Estate to Pay U.S. Virgin Islands Over $105 Million." *Rolling Stone,* November 30, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jeffrey-epstein-estate-virgin-islands-settlement-1234639327/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Special Competitive Studies Project.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Special Competitive Studies Project.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fd3e55ff --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Special Competitive Studies Project.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SpecialCompetitiveStudiesProject + - EricSchmidt + - ArtificialIntelligence + - NationalSecurity + - China +alias: + - Special Competitive Studies Project + - SCSP +summary: "The Special Competitive Studies Project is the nonprofit think tank Eric Schmidt founded in 2021 to continue his national-security commission's work on US competition with China in artificial intelligence and emerging technology." +location: "Arlington, Virginia" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a nonprofit think tank founded in October 2021 by [[Eric Schmidt]], the former [[Google]] chief executive, to advance United States competitiveness against [[China]] in [[Artificial Intelligence]] and other emerging technologies. It grew directly out of Schmidt's chairmanship of the [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]], which ran from 2018 to 2021, and was consciously modeled on a Cold War studies project. It is a subsidiary of the [[Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation]], the Schmidt family's private foundation, and is led by [[Ylli Bajraktari]], who had been the national-security commission's executive director.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the Cold War Model + +Schmidt announced the project on October 5, 2021, framing it as a successor to the work of his AI commission, whose mandate expired that year. He named it after the Special Studies Project that [[Nelson Rockefeller]] commissioned in 1956 and that [[Henry Kissinger]] directed, a panel that assessed American strategy across military, economic, and social fronts during the early Cold War. The choice of name signaled the project's ambition to produce sweeping competitiveness strategy rather than narrow technical reports, and Schmidt argued the country needed to "think, organize and compete in significantly new ways."[^2][^3] + +SCSP assembled a bipartisan board drawn heavily from the defense and national-security establishment, including [[Robert Work]], the former deputy secretary of defense who had cochaired the AI commission with Schmidt, Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy national security adviser, [[Michèle Flournoy]], a former undersecretary of defense for policy, and [[Mac Thornberry]], the former Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The board was bipartisan and drawn almost entirely from the senior ranks of the defense and national-security establishment.[^1][^2] + +### Mission and Reports + +SCSP describes its mission as making recommendations to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness as AI and emerging technologies reshape national security, the economy, and society. It publishes strategy reports and "action plans" on AI, biotechnology, microelectronics, quantum computing, and 5G/6G networks, consistently arguing that the United States is in a technology contest with China that it risks losing without large public investment and a tighter alliance between Silicon Valley and the government. Its reports have cited specific industrial models, such as a Michigan distributed-manufacturing network, as templates the Defense Department should follow.[^4][^5] + +Reported financial figures for SCSP are limited because of its private foundation structure, with third-party estimates placing its annual revenue in the single-digit millions of dollars and its staff at several dozen employees. The organization registered as a lobbying presence and its leadership testified before Congress, with Schmidt appearing as its chair before a House committee in March 2023, giving the privately funded body a formal channel into legislative technology policy.[^5][^6] + +### The AI Expo for National Competitiveness + +In May 2024 SCSP held the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, a two-day event on May 7 and 8 that drew government officials, allied governments, research institutions, and more than two hundred exhibitors. The data-analytics and defense contractor [[Palantir Technologies]] was the lead sponsor, and additional sponsors included Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Groq, and the China-focused intelligence firms Datenna and Strider.[^7][^8] + +The expo gave SCSP a recurring venue where defense contractors, AI companies, and national-security officials convened around the China-competition agenda the project promotes, and it returned in subsequent years under the AI+ Expo branding. Many of the technology and defense firms exhibiting stood to benefit from the increased government AI spending SCSP's reports advocate.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Who We Are," Special Competitive Studies Project, on the organization's status as a subsidiary of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, its leadership under Ylli Bajraktari, and its board including Robert Work, Nadia Schadlow, Michèle Flournoy, and Mac Thornberry. https://www.scsp.ai/about/who-we-are/ +[^2]: "Dr. Eric Schmidt announces Special Competitive Studies Project (Oct 5, 2021)," SCSP, on the October 5, 2021 announcement, the model on Nelson Rockefeller's 1956 Special Studies Project led by Henry Kissinger, the connection to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and Ylli Bajraktari as chief executive. https://www.scsp.ai/2021/10/dr-eric-schmidt-announces-special-competitive-studies-project-oct-5-2021-3/ +[^3]: "National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: 2021 Final Report," NSCAI, March 2021, on the commission's 2018-2021 run under Schmidt and Robert Work and its China-competition findings. https://www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report/ +[^4]: "Special Competitive Studies Project report spearheaded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls out Michigan-based Project DIAMOnD as distributed 3D printing model for DoD to follow," Project DIAMOnD, on SCSP's strategy reports and industrial-model recommendations. https://www.projectdiamond.org/news/special-competitive-studies-project-scsp-report-spearheaded-by-former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-calls-out-michigan-based-project-diamond-as-distributed-3d-printing-model-for-dod-to-follow +[^5]: "Special Competitive Studies Project," Salary.com company overview, and Growjo, on the estimated annual revenue in the single-digit millions and the staff count. https://growjo.com/company/Special_Competitive_Studies_Project_-_SCSP +[^6]: "Eric Schmidt, SCSP Chair," House Committee on Oversight and Accountability witness biography, March 8, 2023, on Schmidt's congressional testimony as chair of SCSP. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115432/witnesses/HHRG-118-GO12-Bio-SchmidtE-20230308.pdf +[^7]: "Major Expo on National AI Competitiveness Addresses America's Readiness to Lead," SCSP, January 2024, on the inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness held May 7-8, 2024 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center with more than 200 exhibitors. https://www.scsp.ai/2024/01/major-expo-on-national-ai-competitiveness-addresses-americas-readiness-to-lead/ +[^8]: "Palantir Technologies Partners with SCSP's AI Expo on National Competitiveness," SCSP, February 2024, on Palantir as lead sponsor and the additional sponsors including Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Groq, Datenna, and Strider. https://www.scsp.ai/2024/02/palantir/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Stanford Research Institute.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Stanford Research Institute.md index cbefafa1..baf1a04d 100644 --- a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Stanford Research Institute.md +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Stanford Research Institute.md @@ -1,28 +1,67 @@ --- -created: 2025-07-22 -updated: 2025-07-22 -title: Stanford Research Institute +category: "Private Organization" tags: - Organization - - Private - - Research - - Think Tank - - USA - - California -description: The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was a key institution in the history of remote viewing, conducting research for the CIA and other intelligence agencies. -category: "Private Organization" + - SRI + - SRIInternational + - ARPANET + - AugmentationResearchCenter + - MenloPark + - RemoteViewing +alias: + - SRI + - SRI International + - Stanford Research Institute +summary: "Stanford Research Institute is the Menlo Park research institute, founded in 1946 and independent since 1970, that produced Douglas Engelbart's 1968 'Mother of All Demos,' the second ARPANET node, and the U.S. government's classified remote-viewing program under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ." start: 1946 location: "Menlo Park, California" -summary: "The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) is a scientific research institute in Menlo Park, California, that became the center of the U.S. government's classified psychic research program in the early 1970s, where Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ conducted the foundational remote viewing experiments for the CIA." +created: 2025-07-22 +updated: 2026-06-20 --- -The [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) is a scientific research institute based in Menlo Park, California. In the early 1970s, SRI became the center of the U.S. government's secret psychic research program, which would eventually become known as the [[STARGATE PROJECT]].[^1] +Stanford Research Institute, known since 1977 as SRI International, is a nonprofit contract research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 by trustees of Stanford University as a center of innovation serving regional and global industry. It became independent of Stanford in 1970. Over its history SRI developed bank check automation, the location study for Disneyland, [[Douglas Engelbart]]'s Augmentation Research Center and the 1968 demonstration later called the "Mother of All Demos," the second node of the ARPANET, the Shakey mobile robot, and the speech assistant that became Siri, and it also housed the government-funded parapsychology program run by [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]].[^1][^2] -SRI was a large and prestigious think tank, with close ties to Stanford University, and was primarily funded by government contracts, many of which were highly classified. This made it an ideal location for sensitive research into psychic phenomena.[^1] +### The 1946 Founding and Early Contracts -The psi research at SRI was led by physicists [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]]. They conducted experiments with a number of psychics, including [[Ingo Swann]], [[Pat Price]], and [[Uri Geller]]. The research was funded by the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]] (DIA), and other government agencies.[^1] +SRI was established in 1946 by [[Stanford University]] trustees to support the economic development of the American West and to give the university a vehicle for applied, contract-funded research serving industry. In its first decades it became one of the largest contract research organizations in the country, working across the physical sciences, engineering, economics, and operations research. Two early commercial projects became famous. In the 1950s, under contract to [[Bank of America]], SRI engineers built ERMA, the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, and the magnetic-ink character recognition (MICR) printing on checks that remains the banking industry's standard for automated check processing.[^1][^2] -SRI was responsible for developing many of the key concepts and techniques of remote viewing, including [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV) and the use of outbounder teams. The research at SRI was instrumental in convincing the intelligence community that remote viewing had the potential to be a valuable intelligence-gathering tool. Despite initial skepticism from some within the scientific community, Puthoff and Targ were able to publish some of their findings in reputable scientific journals, lending a degree of credibility to the field.[^1] +In April 1953 [[Walt Disney|Walt]] and [[Roy Disney]] hired the SRI economist Harrison Price to study the feasibility and siting of their proposed amusement park; Price's analysis led the Disneys to the Anaheim site where Disneyland opened in 1955, and SRI continued to advise the park as it expanded. Alongside this commercial work the institute took on a large volume of military and government contracts during the Cold War, the source of the controversy that later separated it from the university.[^2] + +### The Augmentation Research Center + +In 1957 the electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart joined SRI, where he pursued a conviction, set out in his October 1962 report *Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework*, that computers should be built to extend rather than replace human reasoning. That report, prepared for the [[U.S. Air Force]] Office of Scientific Research, drew the attention of [[J.C.R. Licklider]], the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Department's [[Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (ARPA), who funded Engelbart's new Augmentation Research Center in early 1963; [[NASA]] and ARPA support expanded after [[Robert Taylor]] took up the cause, first at NASA and then as IPTO director from 1965.[^3][^4] + +The center built the oN-Line System, or NLS, a working interactive computing environment running on an SDS 940 timesharing computer that combined the mouse (which Engelbart invented and patented), a chord keyset, bit-mapped screens, hierarchical document outlines, hypertext links, on-screen windows, and real-time collaborative editing among networked terminals. Engelbart's team included researchers such as [[Bill English]], who built the first mouse prototype, and the future [[Xerox PARC]] and Apple lineage of graphical-interface design traces directly to their work.[^3][^4] + +### The Mother of All Demos + +On December 9, 1968, Engelbart presented NLS in a ninety-minute live demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, sitting on stage with a mouse and keyset while his team at SRI in Menlo Park appeared on a large projected screen over a leased microwave and video link. The session showed the mouse, hypertext, on-screen video conferencing, shared-screen collaborative editing, and windowed text, most of which would not reach ordinary computer users for another two decades. The journalist Steven Levy later popularized the name "the Mother of All Demos" for the event, which the Computer History Museum has called a foundational moment of interactive computing.[^3][^5] + +The demonstration was staged with the help of the countercultural impresario [[Stewart Brand]], who had produced [[Ken Kesey]]'s Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966 and who launched the [[Whole Earth Catalog]] in the same autumn of 1968. Brand operated cameras and helped coordinate the video link from SRI, and the team used the Stanford Research Institute campus, a leased commercial video projector, and a homemade modem-and-microwave setup to carry the live images of the Menlo Park computer to the conference hall.[^5] + +### The Second Node of the ARPANET + +When ARPA built the [[ARPANET]], the packet-switched network that became the technical ancestor of the internet, SRI was chosen as the second of its original four nodes, after the [[University of California]], Los Angeles. On October 29, 1969, a UCLA student programmer, [[Charley Kline]], attempted to log in to Engelbart's SDS 940 at SRI over the new network; the system crashed after transmitting the first two letters of "login," so the first message ever sent across the ARPANET was the word "lo," with a full connection achieved about an hour later.[^6] + +SRI's role in the early network extended past the first connection. From 1972 the institute operated the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET, the directory and registration service that maintained the master list of host names and addresses and the official documents of the growing network; [[Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler]] directed the NIC group at SRI from the early 1970s until 1989, and her team maintained the host table and the early domain registries that preceded the modern Domain Name System.[^6] + +### The 1970 Separation and Later Work + +During the Vietnam War, student activists at Stanford protested the university's ties to SRI, whose contracts included classified military and counterinsurgency research, arguing that the relationship made the university part of the military-industrial complex. After demonstrations in the spring of 1969, including a sit-in at the SRI building and tear-gassing of protesters near the site in May 1969, the Stanford trustees voted to sever the institute, and SRI became a fully independent nonprofit in 1970, taking the name SRI International in 1977.[^1][^2] Its Artificial Intelligence Center, founded in 1966, built Shakey, the first mobile robot able to reason about its own actions, between 1966 and 1972; decades later the center's DARPA-funded CALO project spun off the company Siri in 2007, which Apple acquired in 2010.[^2] + +### The Remote-Viewing Program + +From 1972 to about 1995 SRI hosted a classified, government-funded parapsychology research program investigating "[[remote viewing]]," the claimed ability to perceive distant or hidden targets by extrasensory means, conducted for clients including the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]. The physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran the SRI experiments, working with subjects such as the artist [[Ingo Swann]], the former police officer [[Pat Price]], and the celebrity psychic [[Uri Geller]], and the program was one strand of the broader military and intelligence effort later consolidated under the name [[STARGATE PROJECT]].[^7][^8] + +SRI developed several of the core techniques of the field, including [[Coordinate Remote Viewing]] (CRV) and the use of outbounder teams sent to randomly chosen locations for a viewer to describe. The institute's prestige and its heavy reliance on classified government contracts made it a fitting home for the sensitive work, and Puthoff and Targ published some of their results in reputable scientific journals, lending the field a measure of credibility that helped persuade parts of the intelligence community that remote viewing might serve as an intelligence-gathering tool.[^8] ### Footnotes -[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997. \ No newline at end of file + +[^1]: "History, Leadership, and Values," About SRI International, on the 1946 founding by Stanford trustees as a center of innovation, the 1970 separation from Stanford, the ERMA and MICR banking work, and the institute's scale. https://www.sri.com/about-us/ +[^2]: "SRI International," institutional overview, on the 1946 founding to support West Coast economic development, the 1953 to 1955 Disneyland feasibility study by Harrison Price, the 1970 separation amid Vietnam-era protests over DARPA-funded military research, the 1977 rename to SRI International, Shakey the robot (1966 to 1972), and the Siri spin-off (2007) acquired by Apple (2010). +[^3]: "Augmentation Research Center" and "Foundation of Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center," History of Information, on Engelbart joining SRI in 1957, the October 1962 report *Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework* for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Licklider's early-1963 ARPA funding, Robert Taylor's NASA and ARPA support, and the NLS system with the mouse, keyset, hypertext, and collaborative editing. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3136 +[^4]: Markoff, John, and contemporary accounts of the Augmentation Research Center, on Bill English building the first mouse prototype and the lineage from NLS to Xerox PARC and the graphical user interface; and "How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future," Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/ +[^5]: "The Mother of All Demos," accounts of the December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, and shared-screen editing, and Stewart Brand's role in staging and filming it; "Net@50," Computer History Museum. https://computerhistory.org/blog/net-50-did-engelbart-s-mother-of-all-demos-launch-the-connected-world/ +[^6]: "Charley Kline Sends the First Message Over the ARPANET," History of Information, on SRI as the second ARPANET node, the October 29, 1969 transmission of "lo," and the crash; and "Elizabeth J. Feinler," on her direction of SRI's Network Information Center for the ARPANET from the early 1970s until 1989 and her maintenance of the host table and early registries. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1108 +[^7]: Standard accounts of the SRI remote-viewing program, 1972 to about 1995, funded by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and run by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff with subjects including Ingo Swann and Pat Price, as one strand of the program later known as Project Stargate. See the vault pages on Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, and Project Stargate. +[^8]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* Dell, 1997, on the SRI psychic-research program, the subjects including Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Uri Geller, the development of Coordinate Remote Viewing and outbounder protocols, and the publication of results in scientific journals. diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Survival and Flourishing Fund.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Survival and Flourishing Fund.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..dada0cbf --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Survival and Flourishing Fund.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - SurvivalAndFlourishingFund + - ExistentialRisk + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - JaanTallinn +alias: + - SFF +summary: "The Survival and Flourishing Fund is the grant-allocation vehicle backed chiefly by Jaan Tallinn that uses a software-assisted method called the S-process to direct money to existential-risk, AI-safety, and longtermist organizations, having organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts since 2019." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a grant-allocation vehicle, backed chiefly by the [[Skype]] cofounder [[Jaan Tallinn]], that directs money to organizations concerned with the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life. It uses a software-assisted allocation method called the S-process to convert the judgments of a rotating panel of evaluators into grant recommendations, and it has become one of the central funding channels of the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermist]] ecosystem, channeling money to [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]]-safety, biosecurity, and existential-risk groups. By its own accounting it has organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts across its rounds.[^1][^2] + +### Origins and Funders + +SFF grew out of Tallinn's earlier "Survival and Flourishing" donations, the loose label under which he had been giving to existential-risk and rationalist organizations, and it was formalized in 2019 with an initial grant of about 2 million dollars from the Organizational Grants Program of the [[Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative]] (BERI), itself funded by Tallinn's philanthropy. The structure let Tallinn delegate the evaluation of applicants to a committee rather than make every funding decision himself, while retaining final authority over whether to act on the recommendations.[^1][^3] + +Tallinn remains the dominant funder, but other donors have joined particular rounds, including the [[Ripple]] cofounder and cryptocurrency philanthropist [[Jed McCaleb]] and the [[Future of Life Institute]]. The fund's operations are run by Survival and Flourishing Corp (SFC), a separate entity that administers the rounds and the grant-making software; figures associated with its management have included the AI-safety researcher [[Andrew Critch]] and the software engineer Eric Rogstad. Annual distributions have ranged from the roughly 2 million dollars of the 2019 round to more than 40 million dollars in 2024.[^1][^4] + +### The S-Process + +The S-process (the "S" stands for "simulation") is the recurring procedure SFF runs once or twice a year to turn human judgment into dollar allocations. Each round recruits a panel of roughly four to twelve "recommenders" chosen by the funders, who review the applications and each express a marginal-value or utility function describing how much they think additional money to each organization is worth. A grant-making application then simulates the funding process, combining the recommenders' functions so that the system favors projects with enthusiastic individual champions rather than only broad consensus picks. SFF has credited the method's development to Andrew Critch, Tallinn, [[Oliver Habryka]], Kevin Arlin, and Jason Moggridge.[^1][^5] + +The mechanism is designed so that recommenders are given equal weight, in effect producing a synthetic average evaluator, while funders retain final say over whether to implement the output. In recent years SFF has run multiple parallel tracks within a single round; the 2025 round used twelve recommenders split across a six-person Main Track and two specialized three-person tracks named the Fairness Track and the Freedom Track, and it also offered matching pledges under which Tallinn committed to match outside donations at set rates. SFF separately operates a faster "Speculation Grants" program for time-sensitive funding between the main rounds.[^5][^6] + +### Organizations Funded + +SFF's grants have flowed to the core institutions of the AI-risk and existential-risk field. Recipients across its rounds have included the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], the [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]], the Future of Life Institute, and a wide range of newer AI-safety, governance, and biosecurity groups. The 2025 round alone recommended about 34.3 million dollars, with named grants including 2.035 million dollars to the AI Futures Project, 1.635 million dollars to the AI Policy Institute, 1.607 million dollars to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 1.5 million dollars to the biosecurity project SecureDNA, 1.311 million dollars to Lightcone Infrastructure, and 1.133 million dollars to Palisade Research.[^6][^7] + +Other recurring beneficiaries have spanned technical alignment research, AI-policy advocacy, pandemic preparedness, and the rationalist community infrastructure that hosts much of this work, with individual grants typically ranging from around 10,000 dollars to well over a million dollars. Critics of the broader field have noted that a small number of donors, with Tallinn prominent among them, supply much of the money that funds the organizations scrutinizing advanced AI, a concentration that the S-process distributes but does not eliminate.[^2][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund," official site, on its purpose, the 2019 BERI grant of about 2 million dollars funded by Jaan Tallinn, the roughly 150 million dollars organized across rounds, additional funders including Jed McCaleb and the Future of Life Institute, and management by Survival and Flourishing Corp. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/ +[^2]: "TIME100 Philanthropy: Jaan Tallinn," Time, 2026, on SFF directing roughly 150 million dollars to more than 300 projects and Tallinn as principal funder. https://time.com/collection/time100-philanthropy/2026/jaan-tallinn/ +[^3]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)," LongtermWiki, on the fund's origins in Tallinn's earlier Survival and Flourishing donations and the BERI grant. https://ea-crux-project.vercel.app/knowledge-base/organizations/sff/ +[^4]: "Speculation Grants," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on the management by Survival and Flourishing Corp and the speculation-grant program. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants +[^5]: "The S-Process," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on the simulation-based method, the four-to-twelve recommenders, the marginal-utility functions, the funders' final say, and the method's development by Andrew Critch, Jaan Tallinn, Oliver Habryka, Kevin Arlin, and Jason Moggridge. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/s-process +[^6]: "SFF-2025 S-Process Recommendations Announcement," Survival and Flourishing Fund, 2025, on the twelve recommenders, the Main, Fairness, and Freedom tracks, the roughly 34.3 million dollars recommended, the named grants, and the matching pledges. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations +[^7]: "2021 H2 S-Process Grant Round Recommendations," Survival and Flourishing Fund, on recurring recipients across rounds. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2021/h2/recommendations diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Teneo Network.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Teneo Network.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7cc4b0c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Teneo Network.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - TeneoNetwork + - LeonardLeo + - EvanBaehr + - JoshHawley + - DarkMoney + - FederalistSociety + - ConservativeMovement +alias: + - Teneo Network +summary: "Teneo Network is a private, members-only conservative leadership organization founded in 2008 by Evan Baehr and Josh Hawley, chaired since 2021 by Leonard Leo, whose stated goal is to recruit, connect, and deploy influential conservatives across American institutions to, in Leo's words, 'crush liberal dominance.'" +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Teneo Network is a private, members-only conservative leadership organization founded in 2008 by [[Evan Baehr]] and [[Josh Hawley]], the latter then a corporate lawyer and future U.S. senator from [[Missouri]]. [[Leonard Leo]], the longtime executive vice president of the [[Federalist Society]] and the principal architect of the conservative Supreme Court supermajority, joined the network as chairman in 2021. The organization's stated purpose, as described in internal materials obtained by [[ProPublica]] in March 2023, is to recruit, connect, and deploy influential conservatives across American law, finance, media, academia, and culture to, in Leo's framing, "crush liberal dominance" in each of those sectors. Teneo Network is a distinct entity from [[Teneo (consulting firm)|Teneo Holdings]], the unrelated global CEO-advisory and public-relations firm, and the two should not be conflated.[^1] + +### Founding by Baehr and Hawley + +Evan Baehr and Josh Hawley founded Teneo Network in 2008, when both were in their late twenties and early thirties and moving through the conservative legal and policy networks. Baehr is a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative causes who had worked at the [[Heritage Foundation]] and in venture-backed political technology. Hawley was a corporate litigator at the [[Gibson Dunn]] firm who had clerked for Chief Justice [[John Roberts]] on the Supreme Court and who would later become Attorney General of Missouri (2017-2019) and U.S. senator from Missouri (2019-present).[^1] + +The 2008 founding predates both men's subsequent prominence and predates the formal involvement of Leonard Leo. *ProPublica* reported that the original concept was developed within the conservative legal-network orbit in which both founders moved, and the early membership drew on the Federalist Society chapters and the clerkship networks that feed the conservative legal movement. The founders' goal, as expressed in the internal documents *ProPublica* obtained, was to build a "Federalist Society for everything," extending the model of a members-only ideological network that had succeeded in the legal sector across the rest of American institutional life.[^1] + +### Leonard Leo's Chairmanship + +Leonard Leo joined Teneo Network as chairman in 2021, bringing the financial and organizational infrastructure he had built through the Federalist Society, the [[Judicial Crisis Network]] (now the [[Concord Fund]]), and his broader dark-money operation. Leo's tenure as chairman coincided with a substantial expansion of the network's ambition: internal materials obtained by *ProPublica* described the goal of building networks of conservatives positioned to "roll back" liberal influence in Wall Street firms, media organizations, entertainment companies, and universities.[^1][^2] + +Leo came to the Teneo chairmanship from his role as the principal financier and organizer of the conservative judicial-selection project. Through the Judicial Crisis Network and a network of linked 501(c)(4) dark-money vehicles, Leo directed approximately one billion dollars into the project that produced the Supreme Court confirmations of [[Neil Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett]] during the first Trump administration. The Teneo chairmanship extended that operational model from the courts into the broader institutional landscape.[^1][^2] + +### The "Crush Liberal Dominance" Program + +The internal Teneo materials *ProPublica* published in March 2023 laid out the network's program in direct terms. Teneo events, captured on video obtained by *ProPublica*, featured Leo and other principals describing the goal of placing conservatives in positions of influence across corporate America, entertainment, media, and finance, with the explicit aim of reversing the liberal dominance the network diagnosed in those sectors. The framing was that the conservative movement had succeeded in the courts through the Federalist Society model and should now apply the same model, with the same disciplined long-horizon investment, to the rest of American institutional life.[^1] + +[[NPR]] reported in November 2024 that Leo had publicly confirmed the program in an interview, describing the intent to disrupt liberal dominance across sectors. The *Esquire*, *Salon*, and WNYC *On the Media* coverage extended the *ProPublica* reporting into analysis of how the dark-money infrastructure funded the broader institutional project. The Bradley Impact Fund, a conservative philanthropic vehicle, hosted a Teneo conversation describing the network as "a national, members-only leadership organization that exists to recruit, connect, and deploy the most talented and influential conservatives."[^2][^3][^4][^5] + +### The Thiel Adjacency + +The Teneo-[[Peter Thiel]] connection runs through Evan Baehr's orbit rather than through Thiel's formal cofounding role. *ProPublica* reported that the Teneo concept was developed in part through Baehr's exposure to the Thiel network, and the conservative legal-and-policy infrastructure Teneo was built to extend overlaps with the donor and operative networks that also support the Thiel political projects (the [[Protect Ohio Values PAC|Protect Ohio Values]] funding of [[JD Vance]], the [[Per Aspera Policy]] dark-money vehicle). Josh Hawley's own trajectory from Teneo cofounder to elected office tracks the pattern the JD Vance page documents for the broader Thiel-network recruitment of political entrants.[^1][^6] + +Thiel is not listed in the *ProPublica* record as a Teneo cofounder, contrary to some secondary reporting that has described him in that role. The connection is documented at the level of overlapping donor and operative networks, shared ideological framing around the rollback of liberal institutional dominance, and the shared infrastructure of dark-money vehicles that fund both the Teneo program and the Thiel political projects.[^1] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents +[^2]: "Federalist Society's Leonard Leo Wants to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *NPR Morning Edition,* November 24, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/24/nx-s1-5199049/federalist-society-conservative-supreme-court +[^3]: "Leonard Leo Wants to Use His Dark Money to Remake American Culture." *Esquire,* 2023. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43336330/teneo-leonard-leo/ +[^4]: "A Federalist Society for All Things: Dark Money Enters the Culture Wars." *Salon,* March 18, 2023. https://www.salon.com/2023/03/18/a-federalist-society-for-all-things-dark-money-enters-the-culture/ +[^5]: Bradley Impact Fund. "In Their Words: A Conversation with Teneo." https://www.bradleyimpactfund.org/blog/in-their-words-a-conversation-with-teneo +[^6]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8acbf7e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md @@ -0,0 +1,103 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Zizians + - Rationalism + - Cult + - Violence + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Veganism + - Transhumanism +summary: "The Zizians are a small group led by the computer programmer Jack LaSota that splintered from the Bay Area rationalist movement around an idiosyncratic theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, and AI-apocalypse decision theory, and that has been tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent that produced a federal death-penalty prosecution." +location: "Vallejo, California; San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Zizians are a small ideological group that formed around the computer programmer [[Jack LaSota]], who wrote under the persona "Ziz," as a splinter of the Bay Area [[Rationalist Community]] in the late 2010s. The group fused a borrowed rationalist decision theory with an original theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, anarchism, and transhumanism, and several of its members acted on the doctrine with lethal violence. Between 2022 and 2025 the group was tied to six deaths across [[California]], [[Pennsylvania]], and [[Vermont]], including the January 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]], which produced the first federal death-penalty prosecution brought under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. The members were recruited almost entirely from the rationalist and [[Effective Altruism]] milieu around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI) and the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR), most of them young, highly educated, transgender, and preoccupied with the danger of artificial intelligence.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Origins in the Rationalist Movement + +LaSota, born and raised in [[Fairbanks]], [[Alaska]], studied computer science at the [[University of Alaska Fairbanks]], briefly pursued postgraduate work at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]], and interned at [[NASA]] before relocating to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] around 2013 to involve herself with MIRI and CFAR. She had been an avid reader of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s writing and entered the community as an acolyte before turning into one of its sharpest critics, accusing MIRI and CFAR of "ethical hypocrisy" and of failing to live up to the moral demands of their own rationalist doctrine. By the mid-2010s she had begun publishing dense blog posts that extended rationalist decision theory into claims about gender, cognition, and morality.[^1][^2][^4] + +LaSota began blogging under the persona "Ziz" around 2016, debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on [[LessWrong]] before moving to her own site with longer posts on technology, gender identity, and cognition. CFAR co-founder [[Anna Salamon]] later characterized LaSota as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a Bay Area scene crowded with technical talent, and described the circle's turn toward extremity as an attempt to become "main characters" by other means. The formal split came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected the hemisphere theory and LaSota broke with the community that had drawn her west.[^2][^17][^18] + +### The Rationalist Fleet + +By 2017 LaSota had gathered a small circle of followers, largely transgender and gender-nonconforming rationalists, to establish what they called the "Rationalist Fleet," a floating intentional community organized around anarchic self-sufficiency, cognitive liberation, and total veganism. The group acquired a repurposed World War II tugboat, the Caleb (formerly the Panameta), and sailed it from Alaska to California. When the vessel's upkeep collapsed, members moved into trailers and converted box trucks along the California coast, the living arrangement that later brought them to the [[Vallejo]] property of [[Curtis Lind]].[^2][^5] + +The fleet was conceived as a way to live outside the conventional economy while devoting full attention to averting an AI catastrophe, and members pooled funds to keep the boats running. The scheme placed a cluster of people with no maritime experience aboard aging vessels that demanded constant maintenance, and the financial and physical strain pushed the group ashore within a few years. The truck-and-trailer encampments that followed kept the community mobile and off conventional leases, a pattern that recurred through the Vallejo lot in 2022 and the box trucks parked near [[Frostburg]], Maryland, where members were arrested in 2025.[^2][^5] + +### Ideology + +LaSota's central theory held that the brain's two hemispheres house separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, a "domineering, analytic" masculine left and an "empathetic, intuitive" feminine right, and that each hemisphere could be independently good or evil. She sorted people's mental "cores" into categories of "nongood," "single good," and "double good" according to how completely they aligned with her moral system. She counted very few people, herself among them, as "double good"; the associate [[Gwen Danielson]] was rated only "single good," which in the group's terms meant she could not be fully trusted and had to be watched.[^1][^6] + +The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," an attempt to rest one brain hemisphere while keeping the other awake, which LaSota described as a way to "jailbreak" the mind and deepen a member's commitment to the cause. Members also practiced "debucketing," the deliberate unlearning of inherited social categories in order to reach what LaSota framed as unmediated moral insight. The moral framework took the concept of "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction and combined it with the timeless-decision-theory argument that one should act on universal principles rather than causal pragmatism, so that ordinary ethical compromises became, in the group's account, existential betrayals. LaSota wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in the [[Star Wars]] films, framing a self-consciously adversarial morality against a world the group held to be irredeemably complicit in animal killing and on the verge of collapse through artificial-intelligence misalignment.[^1][^2][^6] + +In February 2018 a follower, [[Maia Pasek]], who used the name "Squirrel," died by suicide after intense involvement with LaSota and the group's psychological practices. Outside observers attributed the death to the sleep-deprivation experiments; LaSota instead presented it as evidence of the transformative power of the method.[^2] + +LaSota's account folded the death into the hemisphere doctrine, holding that Pasek's two hemispheres had reached opposing moral verdicts and that one had killed the other, a framing that recast a suicide as a logical outcome of the practice rather than a casualty of it. The group treated the experiments as a kind of moral and cognitive boot camp, and the willingness to read a member's death as confirmation rather than refutation became a feature of how the circle processed later violence and casualties among its own.[^2][^6] + +### The 2019 CFAR Break and the Name + +In November 2019 LaSota, [[Emma Borhanian]], [[Alexander Leatham]] (who used the name "Somni"), and Danielson, among others, appeared in [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes masks]] and black robes to protest a CFAR alumni retreat at [[Occidental]] in [[Sonoma County]], blocking the entrances and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four people were arrested. CFAR had already barred LaSota and Danielson from its events that year, and the wider rationalist movement publicly distanced itself from the circle. The label "Zizians" was coined by online commentators warning the rationalist scene about LaSota; the group never adopted the name itself. One participant in the standoff was still being sentenced for it as late as April 2026.[^1][^3][^7] + +The protest framed CFAR as having concealed sexual misconduct within rationalist organizations, the same grievance of institutional hypocrisy that had driven LaSota's earlier break, now escalated into a masked physical blockade. The arrests gave the group its first criminal exposure and tied several of the people later central to the killings, Borhanian, Leatham, and Danielson, into a single documented incident years before the violence. The slow pace of the prosecution, with a defendant still facing sentencing in 2026 for conduct in 2019, kept the standoff procedurally alive across the entire arc of the later cases.[^1][^7] + +### The Faked Deaths + +Disappearance and feigned death recur in the group's history. Danielson stopped appearing for court hearings in April 2019, and a lawyer later suggested she might be dead. In August 2022 LaSota staged her own death, leaving the impression that she had drowned after going off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in [[Philadelphia]] in 2023. She was wanted in two states by the time she was arrested in 2025.[^5][^8] + +The 2022 disappearance followed a specific script: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was recovered, and an obituary was published, leaving an official record of a drowning that let her drop out of pending Vallejo proceedings. The recruitment pattern that fed the group depended on similar severances on the members' side. Several younger recruits cut contact with their families before joining, sending final messages and changing phone numbers, so that the group absorbed people who had already vanished from their previous lives, a dynamic that surfaced again in the 2024 disappearance of [[Teresa Youngblut]].[^3][^8] + +### The Vallejo Killings + +By autumn 2022 LaSota and several followers were living in vehicles on a Vallejo lot owned by Curtis Lind, an octogenarian landlord who rented them space. On November 15, 2022, a dispute over unpaid rent escalated when members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him an eye; Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed Emma Borhanian, a longtime LaSota collaborator. Leatham and [[Suri Dao]] were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind; Leatham later attempted to escape custody twice.[^2][^9] + +On January 17, 2025, Lind was killed near the site of the 2022 attack, stabbed with his throat cut, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. [[Maximilian Snyder]], a former [[University of Oxford]] student connected to the group, was charged by [[Solano County]] prosecutors with Lind's murder, which prosecutors alleged was meant to prevent his testimony.[^9][^10] + +### The Pennsylvania Killings + +On December 31, 2022, [[Richard Zajko]] and [[Rita Zajko]] were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of [[Michelle Zajko]], a member of the group; Michelle was questioned and treated as a person of interest but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Investigators have linked a firearm tied to Michelle Zajko to subsequent incidents involving the group.[^3][^11] + +The couple, ages 72 and 69, were not found until a January 2, 2023 welfare check; Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, and two 9mm shell casings were left at the scene with no weapon recovered. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania investigators determined that ammunition matching the scene had been purchased by Michelle Zajko, who acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and in early 2023 LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. The case remained unsolved into 2026, with the WHYY and AP timelines noting that no one had been charged in the deaths themselves.[^11][^16][^19] + +### The Vermont Killing + +On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, near the Canadian border, carrying Teresa Youngblut and [[Felix Bauckholt]], a German national and quantitative trader who used the name "Ophelia." A shootout followed in which Agent David Maland was killed and Bauckholt was shot dead; Youngblut was wounded. Federal prosecutors allege Youngblut fired the shot that killed Maland. The killing drew national attention to the group and set off the arrests that followed.[^3][^12] + +The pair had drawn law enforcement attention days earlier: a hotel employee in Lyndonville reported that they had checked in around January 14 wearing all-black tactical clothing and protective gear, including a holstered firearm, which prompted periodic surveillance, and investigators observed them in tactical dress in downtown Newport on January 19. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut got out of the vehicle during the stop and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before being shot. A search of the vehicle turned up multiple firearms, .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, handheld radios, and roughly a dozen electronic devices, several wrapped in aluminum foil. Maland died at North Country Hospital and Youngblut was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock.[^12][^20] + +### Arrests and Prosecutions + +On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Michelle Zajko and [[Daniel Blank]] in Allegany County, [[Maryland]], after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators found LaSota in possession of a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the three were ordered held without bail. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted LaSota on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years.[^13][^21] + +On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation for LaSota after defense attorney Gary Proctor reported that she had refused to speak with a doctor brought to the jail and had told a prior hearing that the judge led an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." LaSota's lawyers separately rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in court filings and accused the Department of Justice of misgendering their client by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center pending the evaluation.[^14][^22] + +Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in August 2025 added the murder of Maland and the assault of two other agents, and the Department of Justice filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, the first such pursuit of the second Trump administration. She pleaded not guilty in September 2025, and proceedings continued into 2026. Snyder was charged by Solano County with Lind's murder, and Leatham and Dao with the 2022 killing of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. By early 2026 at least seven people associated with the group were fighting charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The six deaths attributed to the group are Borhanian and Lind in California, Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania, and Maland and Bauckholt in Vermont.[^3][^15][^16] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/ +[^2]: "Zizians," World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, November 7, 2025; scholarly profile of the group's origins, the Rationalist Fleet, ideology, and timeline. https://wrldrels.org/2025/11/07/zizians/ +[^3]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^4]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/ +[^5]: "'Zizian' namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states," *Open Vallejo,* January 31, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/ +[^6]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025, on the hemisphere theory, the "single good" and "double good" classifications, and the group's composition. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309 +[^7]: "Woman sentenced for 2019 Sonoma County standoff involving cultlike Zizians group linked to killings," *The Press Democrat,* April 23, 2026. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/04/23/sonoma-county-woman-sentenced-for-2019-standoff-zizians/ +[^8]: "Key figure in 'Zizian' group tied to Vermont border patrol shooting faked death in 2022 and is wanted in 2 states," *VTDigger,* February 2, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/02/02/key-figure-in-zizian-group-tied-to-vermont-border-patrol-shooting-faked-death-in-2022-and-is-wanted-in-2-states/ +[^9]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/ +[^10]: "Federal grand jury indicts Zizian namesake with Vallejo ties," *Open Vallejo,* June 20, 2025, on the Snyder charge and the Lind killing. https://openvallejo.org/2025/06/20/federal-grand-jury-indicts-zizian-namesake-with-vallejo-ties/ +[^11]: "Michelle Zajko case: Member of cultlike Zizian group says she did not kill her parents in Delaware County," 6abc Philadelphia, 2025. https://6abc.com/post/michelle-zajko-case-member-zizian-group-says-she-did-not-kill-parents-delaware-county/16181890/ +[^12]: "Prosecutors file notice they will seek the death penalty against Teresa Youngblut in border agent killing," *VTDigger,* August 14, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/08/14/grand-jury-returns-new-indictment-against-teresa-youngblut-for-allegedly-killing-border-agent/ +[^13]: U.S. Department of Justice, District of Maryland, "Alaskan Individual Charged with Possessing Firearms and Ammunition as a Fugitive from Justice," June 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/alaskan-individual-charged-possessing-firearms-and-ammunition-fugitive-justice +[^14]: "Judge orders competency evaluation for alleged 'Zizian' cult leader Ziz LaSota," *The Baltimore Banner,* November 2025. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizian-cult-leader-competency-evaluation-PXYELJW3NBB5HOUWG6MA4U4E3I/ +[^15]: "Prosecutors seek death penalty against Zizians member charged with murdering Vermont border agent," Associated Press, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-seek-death-penalty-fatal-shooting-border-patrol-agent/ +[^16]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/ +[^17]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the 2016 start of the "Ziz" blog and the 2018 split from the rationalist movement. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont +[^18]: "Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley," Ian Leslie, 2025, on Anna Salamon's account of LaSota wanting to "feel special" and the group's pursuit of being "main characters." https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley +[^19]: "Member of Zizians, cultlike group of AI-obsessed vegans, says she didn't kill her parents," *NBC News,* 2025, on the gunshot wounds, 9mm casings, and ammunition purchase. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/member-zizians-cultlike-group-ai-obsessed-vegans-says-didnt-kill-paren-rcna201537 +[^20]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville hotel, the surveillance, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/ +[^21]: "Federal authorities bring firearms charge against alleged leader of Zizians," *VTDigger,* June 20, 2025, on the Frostburg arrest and the federal indictment. https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/20/federal-authorities-bring-firearms-charge-against-alleged-leader-of-zizians/ +[^22]: "Competency review ordered for Jack 'Ziz' LaSota, who rejects 'Zizian' and 'cult' labels," Associated Press via *The Boston Globe,* March 12, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/12/nation/jack-lasota-zizan-leader-mental-competency/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thiel Fellowship.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thiel Fellowship.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ea039494 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thiel Fellowship.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - ThielFellowship + - ThielFoundation + - PeterThiel + - Recruitment + - Education +alias: + - Thiel Fellowship + - Thiel Fellows + - 20 Under 20 +summary: "The Thiel Fellowship is a program of the Thiel Foundation, founded in 2010 by Peter Thiel, that awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college to pursue a venture, and whose alumni include Vitalik Buterin and other founders who entered the Thiel commercial network through the program." +location: "San Francisco, California (Thiel Foundation)" +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +The Thiel Fellowship is a program of the [[Thiel Foundation]], founded by [[Peter Thiel]] in 2010 (originally as "20 Under 20"), that awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college to pursue a venture. The fellowship is the entry point into the Thiel commercial network for a cohort of founders who were recruited into the network as teenagers or early-twenties entrants, before they had passed through the conventional university and career pipeline. Notable alumni include [[Vitalik Buterin]] (the creator of [[Ethereum]]), [[Ritesh Agarwal]], [[Laura Deming]], [[Austin Russell]], and [[Dale Stephens]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### Founding and the Anti-University Thesis + +Thiel announced the fellowship in 2010 as "20 Under 20," with the explicit framing that university education had become overpriced, risk-averse, and credential-oriented, and that the most talented young people would produce more value by building ventures outside the university than by completing degrees. The original cohort of twenty fellows under the age of twenty was selected in 2011. The award was initially 100,000 dollars over two years; it has since been raised to 250,000 dollars over two years, and the program has shifted from a strict "drop out" requirement to a "skip or stop out" formulation that permits fellows to pause rather than permanently leave their studies.[^1][^4] + +The anti-university thesis is continuous with the broader Thiel argument that credentialism and institutional consensus have captured the conventional education and career pipeline. The fellowship's institutional expression of that thesis is the offer of capital and network access in exchange for exit from the institution, which inverts the standard model in which the institution is the gateway to capital and network. The fellowship has run continuously since 2010 and has selected roughly 20 to 30 fellows per cohort.[^1][^3] + +### Notable Alumni and the Network Effect + +The fellowship's alumni roster is the program's output. Vitalik Buterin was a 2014 fellow who used the period to develop and launch Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Austin Russell founded [[Luminar Technologies]], the autonomous-vehicle lidar company, and became a billionaire on its 2021 public listing. Laura Deming founded the longevity-research venture fund [[Longevity Fund]]. Ritesh Agarwal founded the hospitality company [[Oyo Rooms]]. Dale Stephens founded [[UnCollege]], an organization promoting alternatives to university education.[^1][^2] + +The alumni network provides continuing access to the Thiel commercial orbit. Fellows receive access to the Thiel Foundation's network of founders, investors, and scientists, and the fellowship cohort itself forms a peer network that persists past the two-year award period. Fellows have gone on to raise venture funding from [[Founders Fund]] and adjacent Thiel-network investors. The fellowship identifies and capitalizes talent before the conventional pipeline does.[^1][^3] + +### The Recruitment Layer + +The fellowship identifies high-potential individuals in their teens and early twenties, supplies them with capital and network access, and brings them into the commercial, convening, and ideological infrastructure of the Thiel orbit at an age at which their trajectories are still forming. The approach is continuous with the [[JD Vance]] recruitment (capital and mentorship supplied at the career-formation stage) and the [[Teneo Network]] model of identifying and placing ideological allies across institutional sectors.[^5] + +The fellowship operates alongside the other documented Thiel-network recruitment and convening vehicles: the Founders Fund portfolio companies, the [[Dialog]] conference, [[Hereticon]], the [[Per Aspera Policy]] political-action vehicle, and the Teneo Network conservative-leadership layer. The fellowship is the earliest-stage layer, recruiting at the point of educational exit rather than at the point of commercial or political entry.[^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Thiel Fellowship. Official program site. https://thielfellowship.org/ +[^2]: "Gen Z and millennial founders who dropped out for the fellowship." *Fortune,* August 16, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/08/16/gen-z-millennial-founders-college-dropout-entrepreneurs-peter-thiel-fellowship/ +[^3]: "Thiel Fellowships don't require students to drop out." *Inside Higher Ed,* November 13, 2012. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/13/thiel-fellowships-dont-require-students-drop-out +[^4]: For the original 2010 "20 Under 20" announcement and the founding program design, see contemporaneous press coverage and the Thiel Foundation's own historical materials. +[^5]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thinking Machines Lab.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thinking Machines Lab.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d320d254 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Thinking Machines Lab.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - ThinkingMachinesLab + - MiraMurati + - OpenAI + - ArtificialIntelligence + - VentureCapital +alias: + - Thinking Machines +summary: "Thinking Machines Lab is the AI research company Mira Murati founded in 2025 with a team drawn heavily from OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and adviser Bob McGrew, which raised a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion valuation reported as one of the largest seed rounds ever." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial-intelligence research company founded by [[Mira Murati]], the former chief technology officer of [[OpenAI]], which emerged from stealth in February 2025. Its founding team and early staff were drawn heavily from OpenAI, including the cofounder and reinforcement-learning pioneer [[John Schulman]] as chief scientist and the research executive Barret Zoph as chief technology officer, with the former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew joining as an adviser. In July 2025 the company closed a seed round of roughly 2 billion dollars at a 12-billion-dollar valuation, a figure widely described as among the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history.[^1][^2] + +### Founding and the OpenAI Lineage + +Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and spent the following months recruiting from the company's senior research ranks. By the time Thinking Machines Lab came out of stealth in February 2025 it had assembled a founding cohort of around 38 people, roughly half of them former OpenAI employees. Beyond Schulman and Zoph, the early staff included Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz, all OpenAI researchers, and the roster reflected a broader migration of post-training and alignment talent out of OpenAI in 2024 and 2025. Schulman had himself left OpenAI for [[Anthropic]] in August 2024 before joining Murati's lab.[^2][^3] + +The company positioned itself around making advanced AI more customizable and more understandable, with Murati saying it would share scientific work to help the research community grasp how frontier systems behave. She told investors and press that the lab would unveil its first product within months and would include "a significant open source offering" aimed at researchers and startups building their own models. In April 2025 the lab added several prominent former OpenAI figures as advisers, among them Bob McGrew, who had been OpenAI's chief research officer until September 2024, and the former OpenAI researcher Alec Radford.[^3][^4] + +### The Seed Round and Investors + +In July 2025 Thinking Machines Lab raised approximately 2 billion dollars in a seed round that valued the company at 12 billion dollars, up from a 10-billion figure reported in June. The round was led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street. Raising 2 billion dollars at the seed stage, before any product, placed the deal among the largest initial financings ever recorded in the venture industry.[^1][^5] + +Meta Platforms reportedly explored an acquisition of the company before any formal offer materialized, and Google Cloud signed on to supply infrastructure for the lab's models. By early 2026 Bloomberg reported that Thinking Machines Lab was in talks for a new round that would value it near 50 billion dollars, even as the company faced the same talent competition it had drawn from: in January 2026 two of its cofounders were reported to be returning to OpenAI.[^5][^6] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round," *TechCrunch,* July 15, 2025, on the roughly 2-billion seed round, the 12-billion valuation, the Andreessen Horowitz lead, the Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street participation, and the open-source plans. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/ +[^2]: "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," *Fortune,* February 6, 2025, on the founding, Schulman as chief scientist, and the OpenAI-derived team. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic +[^3]: "Inside Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's New AI Startup," Built In, on the February 2025 launch, the 38-person founding cohort, the OpenAI lineage, and the cofounders including Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz. https://builtin.com/articles/what-is-thinking-machines-lab +[^4]: "OpenAI's former chief research officer joins Mira Murati's AI startup," reporting on Bob McGrew joining as an adviser in March 2025 and his prior role as OpenAI chief research officer. *TechCrunch,* April 8, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/mira-muratis-ai-startup-gains-prominent-ex-openai-advisers +[^5]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Hits $12B Valuation in Seed Round," Financial IT, on the valuation rise from 10 to 12 billion, the investor roster, and the Meta acquisition interest and Google Cloud infrastructure. https://financialit.net/news/fundraising-news/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-hits-12b-valuation-seed-round +[^6]: "Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab is losing two of its co-founders to OpenAI," *TechCrunch,* January 14, 2026, on the near-50-billion valuation talks and the cofounder departures. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/mira-muratis-startup-thinking-machines-lab-is-losing-two-of-its-co-founders-to-openai diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Towers Financial Corporation.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Towers Financial Corporation.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..72e975f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Towers Financial Corporation.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: [Organization, TowersFinancial, StevenHoffenberg, JeffreyEpstein, PonziScheme, SEC, Fraud, Finance] +alias: ["Towers Financial", "TFC"] +summary: "Manhattan debt-collection and securities firm run by Steven Hoffenberg that collapsed in 1993 and was prosecuted as a roughly 475 million dollar Ponzi scheme, with Jeffrey Epstein documented as a consultant." +location: New York, New York +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Towers Financial Corporation was a debt-collection and securities firm based in Manhattan and controlled by [[Steven Hoffenberg]]. Between roughly 1988 and 1993 it sold promissory notes and bonds to thousands of investors while operating as a Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed in 1993 following action by the [[Securities and Exchange Commission]]. [[Jeffrey Epstein]] worked at the firm as a consultant during this period. + +### Business Model + +Towers Financial grew out of a debt-collection enterprise Steven Hoffenberg started in New York in the 1970s, reportedly from a small initial investment, that bought delinquent accounts at steep discounts and pursued the full balances.[^4] The firm presented itself as a debt-collection company that purchased portfolios of distressed receivables, paying a small fraction of face value for debts that sellers regarded as largely uncollectible.[^1] The receivables included money owed to hospitals, banks and telephone companies, and the company described an expanding base of healthcare and commercial debt that, it claimed, drove annual revenues toward one billion dollars by 1993.[^1] + +To finance these operations the company raised capital from investors by issuing unsecured promissory notes and other securities, marketing them as backed by the receivables portfolios.[^2] In practice, prosecutors and regulators later found, the represented collateral and returns were not supported by the firm's actual collections.[^2] + +Towers also acquired two Illinois insurance companies, United Fire Insurance Co. and Associated Life Insurance Co., in 1987, which served as additional funding sources for the firm and for attempted corporate takeovers.[^3] The [[Illinois Department of Insurance]], then directed by [[James Schacht]], later moved the insurers into liquidation and brought a 1991 civil suit alleging their accounts had been drained, naming Jeffrey Epstein in connection with checks drawn on the United Fire and United Diversified accounts.[^3] + +### The Ponzi Scheme + +Money raised from new investors was used to pay returns and redemptions to earlier investors rather than generated by legitimate debt collection, the defining structure of a Ponzi scheme.[^1] Steven Hoffenberg diverted proceeds to personal expenditures and to attempted corporate acquisitions, and the firm's reported revenues and asset values were inflated.[^2] The fraud drew in thousands of noteholders and bondholders, who later pursued recovery through litigation that named the firm's accountants and other professionals as defendants.[^1] + +The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Towers Financial in February 1993, and in March 1993 the company filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.[^2] A receivership was established to recover assets for defrauded investors, and the matter became one of the largest financial frauds in the United States before that of [[Bernard Madoff]].[^1] Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in April 1995 to five criminal charges of defrauding investors of roughly 462 to 475 million dollars and was sentenced in 1997 by Judge [[Robert W. Sweet]] to 20 years in prison, a one million dollar fine and roughly 463 million dollars in restitution; he settled a related SEC civil suit for 60 million dollars and was released in 2013 after about 18 years.[^2] + +The attempted corporate takeovers drove much of the cash drain. In 1988 Hoffenberg used Towers and the captive Illinois insurers to mount unsuccessful bids for [[Pan American World Airways|Pan Am]] and [[Emery Air Freight]], deploying Jeffrey Epstein as a financial adviser on the financing.[^3] The Pan Am effort collapsed amid the airline's broader decline following the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and the failed raids left the insurers depleted and accelerated regulatory scrutiny of Towers.[^3] + +### Epstein's Role + +Jeffrey Epstein was hired as a consultant around 1987, with reporting citing compensation of about 25,000 dollars per month and a 1988 two million dollar non-repayable loan, and the firm gave him offices at the [[Villard Houses]] in Manhattan.[^3] At the time Epstein operated his own consulting firm, [[International Assets Group]], from his New York apartment after leaving [[Bear Stearns]], and a Towers attorney confirmed his work at the firm and recalled drafting a consulting agreement.[^3] A company press release listed Epstein as "chairman of the board of directors of Intercontinental Asset Group" in the Pan Am financing, and court filings referenced checks payable to "Jeff Epstein" or "Jeff Epstein & Co." totaling about 215,000 dollars drawn on the insurance-company accounts.[^3] + +The extent of Epstein's involvement in the fraud is disputed. Steven Hoffenberg later claimed Epstein was a co-architect of the scheme and his "partner in what we did raising the billion dollars," and [[Terrence Corrigan]], a lawyer for an investor-recovery committee, said Epstein appeared on organizational charts as potentially the second or third most senior figure at the firm.[^3] The 1991 Illinois Department of Insurance suit alleged Epstein manipulated Emery stock through multiple brokerage accounts he controlled and traded without a broker's license.[^3] Epstein left Towers before its collapse, was never charged in connection with the fraud, and investigators said no concrete evidence directly tied him to the criminal conspiracy.[^3] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "Litigation Release: SEC v. Towers Financial Corporation, et al.," *U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,* summarizing the scheme and receivership. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/lr15053.txt +[^2]: "Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, who once ran a Ponzi scheme, was found dead," *NPR,* 2022, summarizing the Towers collapse, SEC action and sentencing. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/26/1119746511/jeffrey-epstein-mentor-steven-hoffenberg-dead +[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein worked at Towers Financial with Steven Hoffenberg, who committed Ponzi scheme crimes," *CBS News,* 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-worked-at-towers-financial-with-stephen-hoffenberg-who-committed-ponzi-scheme-crimes/ +[^4]: "Steven Hoffenberg: Who is the former Epstein associate and New York Post owner?," *Yahoo News,* 2019, on the 1970s debt-collection origins and the firm's early model. https://www.yahoo.com/news/steven-hoffenberg-former-epstein-associate-230443969.html diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/WikiLeaks.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/WikiLeaks.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..753a78f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/WikiLeaks.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - WikiLeaks + - JulianAssange + - Cypherpunks + - Leaks + - TeamThemis + - Palantir +alias: + - WikiLeaks + - Wikileaks +summary: "WikiLeaks is the leak-publishing organization founded by Julian Assange in 2006, whose 2010 disclosures of US military and diplomatic records triggered a banking blockade that pushed it toward Bitcoin, and which was the target of the 2010-2011 Team Themis proposal by Palantir, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies." +location: "Founded online; registered through Sunshine Press" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +WikiLeaks is an organization founded in 2006 by [[Julian Assange]] to publish classified and restricted documents submitted anonymously, built on encryption and anonymity techniques drawn from the [[Cypherpunks]] movement in which Assange had been an early participant. Its 2010 release of United States military and diplomatic records, supplied by the Army analyst Chelsea Manning, made it a global political actor and prompted the major payment processors to cut off donations in a "banking blockade," after which WikiLeaks adopted [[Bitcoin]]. In 2010 and 2011 a private consortium called Team Themis, made up of [[Palantir Technologies]], HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies and working for the law firm Hunton & Williams and [[Bank of America]], drafted proposals to attack WikiLeaks and to target the journalist [[Glenn Greenwald]], exposed when [[Anonymous (collective)|Anonymous]] hacked HBGary's email in February 2011.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Assange and the Cypherpunk Roots + +Assange joined the cypherpunks mailing list in the mid-1990s under the handle "Proff," posting from Australia, and wrote software in line with the movement's philosophy, including the Rubberhose deniable-encryption system designed to let a user reveal one passphrase under coercion while concealing the existence of further hidden data. He co-wrote, with Suelette Dreyfus, the 1997 history of the international hacker underground "Underground." The cypherpunk premise, that strong encryption lets individuals defend information against states and corporations, carried directly into WikiLeaks, which Assange built around encrypted, anonymous submission so that a source could deliver documents without the publisher being able to identify them.[^4][^5] + +WikiLeaks was registered through the Sunshine Press structure in 2006 and published early disclosures on extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic-waste dumping by the firm Trafigura, the membership rolls of the British National Party, and the operating manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Assange set out his theory of leaking in essays arguing that conspiratorial and authoritarian institutions depend on secret internal communication and that forcing them to operate under the threat of leaks degrades their capacity to act, a logic that treated disclosure as a way to raise the internal cost of secrecy. The journalist [[Andy Greenberg]] traced the line from the cypherpunks to WikiLeaks in his 2012 book "This Machine Kills Secrets."[^4][^6] + +### The 2010 Disclosures and the Banking Blockade + +In 2010 WikiLeaks published a sequence of records leaked by Chelsea Manning. In April it released the gunsight video of a 2007 Baghdad airstrike under the title "Collateral Murder," followed in July by the Afghan War Diary and in October by the Iraq War Logs, two collections of field reports running to hundreds of thousands of documents. In November 2010, working with Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde, and the New York Times, WikiLeaks began publishing the Cablegate archive of about 250,000 United States State Department diplomatic cables. Manning was arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced in 2013 to 35 years, later commuted in 2017.[^1][^7] + +In early December 2010, following the Cablegate release, the principal financial intermediaries cut off WikiLeaks: PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, and Western Union stopped processing donations to the organization in what became known as the banking blockade. The blockade severed most of WikiLeaks's funding without any court order directing it. Anonymous responded with Operation Payback, coordinating distributed denial-of-service attacks against the payment processors in defense of WikiLeaks. The cutoff pushed WikiLeaks to seek a payment channel that no intermediary could close.[^7][^8] + +### Bitcoin Adoption + +WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant donation channel, one of the cryptocurrency's first prominent real-world uses. The move was delayed at the urging of [[Satoshi Nakamoto]], who objected on the bitcointalk forum on 11 December 2010 that "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us," warning that the attention would endanger the young network. Assange later wrote that WikiLeaks agreed with Nakamoto's analysis and held off, launching its public Bitcoin donation address on 14 June 2011 after the currency's first major price rise.[^9][^8] + +Assange argued in 2014 that the two projects had sustained each other, saying that Bitcoin gave WikiLeaks a funding route around the blockade while WikiLeaks's adoption gave Bitcoin an early demonstration of use. The donation address went on to receive thousands of bitcoin over the following years.[^9][^10] + +### Team Themis + +In late 2010 the law firm Hunton & Williams, retained by Bank of America and in contact with the United States Chamber of Commerce, brought together three contractors, Palantir Technologies (the data-analytics firm chaired by [[Peter Thiel]]), HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, under the name Team Themis to develop a response to WikiLeaks, which Bank of America feared held damaging internal documents. The group produced a proposal titled "The WikiLeaks Threat," in which Palantir would handle network and insider-threat analysis while Berico and HBGary Federal analyzed the organization. Reporting in The Tech Herald by the journalist Steve Ragan and in the press that followed described the plan as a dirty-tricks operation against WikiLeaks, its supporters, and journalists.[^2][^11] + +The proposal recommended submitting fabricated documents to WikiLeaks and then attacking the organization's credibility when it published them, stoking internal divisions, launching cyber attacks to steal data on sources, and running a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities." It included a chart of journalists and supporters whose careers could be pressured, among them Glenn Greenwald, then writing for Salon. The slides stated that Greenwald's "level of support" for WikiLeaks "needs to be disrupted," asserted that "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold," and judged that established professionals like him would "choose professional preservation over cause" if pressured. HBGary Federal's chief executive, Aaron Barr, separately set out to unmask members of Anonymous.[^3][^12] + +In February 2011, after Barr publicly claimed he had identified the leadership of Anonymous, the collective broke into HBGary's systems, took control of its email, and released roughly 50,000 internal messages, which exposed the Team Themis proposals and the exchanges between Barr and a Palantir employee about targeting Greenwald. Palantir's chief executive, [[Alex Karp]], issued a public apology to progressive groups and to Greenwald in particular on 11 February 2011 and said the company had severed "any and all contacts" with HBGary; Palantir placed the employee involved, Matthew Steckman, on leave, and Berico's leadership said it had discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal. On 1 March 2011, seventeen members of Congress, led by Representative Hank Johnson, called for an investigation of possible illegal action by Hunton & Williams and Team Themis. HBGary Federal shut down.[^13][^3][^14] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "WikiLeaks," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the 2006 founding by Assange, the 2010 disclosures, and Chelsea Manning. https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks +[^2]: "Themis: Looking at the aftermath of the HBGary Federal scandal," on the Team Themis composition, the Hunton & Williams retainer, and the division of labor among the three firms. https://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/themis-looking-at-the-aftermath-of-the-hbgary-federal-scandal/ +[^3]: "Emails reveal corporate plot to silence WikiLeaks," *Green Left,* on "The WikiLeaks Threat," the proposed tactics, the chart of journalists, the targeting of Greenwald, Aaron Barr, and the Anonymous breach of 50,000 emails. https://www.greenleft.org.au/2011/869/world/emails-reveal-corporate-plot-silence-wikileaks +[^4]: Greenberg, Andy. *This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information.* Dutton, 2012. +[^5]: Dreyfus, Suelette, with research by Julian Assange. *Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.* Mandarin, 1997; on Assange's cypherpunk activity and the Rubberhose system. +[^6]: Assange, Julian. "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance," 2006, on the theory that leaking degrades authoritarian institutions. https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf +[^7]: "Julian Assange: What you need to know about the WikiLeaks founder," *Al Jazeera,* 20 December 2020, on Collateral Murder, the war logs, Cablegate, and Manning's sentence. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/20/julian-assange +[^8]: "Assange: Bitcoin and WikiLeaks Helped Keep Each Other Alive," *CoinDesk,* 16 September 2014, on the banking blockade by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union, and the turn to Bitcoin. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/09/16/assange-bitcoin-and-wikileaks-helped-keep-each-other-alive +[^9]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "WikiLeaks contact info?," bitcointalk forum, 11 December 2010, on "kicked the hornet's nest"; and Assange's account of delaying the Bitcoin channel to 14 June 2011. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280 +[^10]: "WikiLeaks' Public Donation Address Receives 4000th Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on the cumulative donations to the WikiLeaks address. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/wikileaks-public-donation-address-receives-th-bitcoin-1480629241 +[^11]: Ragan, Steve. "Data intelligence firms proposed a systematic attack against WikiLeaks," *The Tech Herald,* February 2011, on "The WikiLeaks Threat" and the roles of Palantir, Berico, and HBGary Federal. Archived at SourceWatch, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/HBGary +[^12]: Greenwald, Glenn. "The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters," *Salon,* 11 February 2011, on the slides targeting him, "needs to be disrupted," "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold," and "choose professional preservation over cause." https://www.salon.com/2011/02/11/threats_against_glenn_greenwald_wikileaks/ +[^13]: "Update: Palantir apologizes for proposal to attack WikiLeaks," *Raw Story,* 11 February 2011, on Alex Karp's apology, the severing of contacts with HBGary, and Berico's discontinuation of ties. https://www.rawstory.com/2011/02/data-intelligence-firms-proposed-attack-wikileaks/ +[^14]: "New information emerges on anti-WikiLeaks plot," *Salon,* 14 February 2011, on Matthew Steckman being placed on leave and the Hunton & Williams role; and on the 1 March 2011 congressional call led by Representative Hank Johnson. https://www.salon.com/2011/02/14/palantir_wikileaks/ diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Worldcoin.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Worldcoin.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a30922ff --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Worldcoin.md @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - Worldcoin + - SamAltman + - Surveillance + - Biometrics + - Cryptocurrency + - ArtificialIntelligence +alias: + - World + - Tools for Humanity + - World ID +summary: "Worldcoin, rebranded World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project cofounded by Sam Altman and operated by Tools for Humanity that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to build a global proof-of-personhood database, and that has been banned or investigated in numerous countries over its data collection." +location: "San Francisco, California; Erlangen, Germany" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Worldcoin, rebranded as World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project announced in October 2021 by [[Sam Altman]] and [[Alex Blania]] and operated by the company [[Tools for Humanity]]. It scans people's irises with a chrome sphere called the Orb to enroll them in a global "proof of personhood" database, issuing each verified person a "World ID" and a cryptocurrency token as an incentive. Conceived as a way to distinguish humans from AI agents online, the project has assembled one of the largest private biometric databases in existence and has been banned, suspended, or placed under investigation in numerous countries. It sits alongside [[Palantir Technologies]], [[Clearview AI]], [[Carbyne]], and [[SafeGraph]] as privately held mass-data infrastructure in the [[Silicon Valley]] network, built by Altman, who emerged from the [[Y Combinator]] and [[Peter Thiel]] orbit.[^1][^2] + +### The Orb and World ID + +Tools for Humanity, with Altman as chairman and Blania as chief executive, designed the Orb to capture a high-resolution image of a person's iris and convert it on the device into a numerical IrisCode, the basis of the World ID, which the system then proves through zero-knowledge cryptography so that a verification need not reveal the underlying scan. The Orb is not bespoke silicon but a custom carrier board built around an off-the-shelf NVIDIA Jetson module that runs the iris processing locally. Worldcoin launched its WLD token on July 24, 2023 as an ERC-20 asset, initially on the Optimism network, and in October 2024 it launched World Chain, its own layer-two blockchain giving Orb-verified humans priority blockspace.[^2][^7] + +The project raised a 115 million dollar Series C in May 2023 led by Blockchain Capital with [[Andreessen Horowitz]] and [[Bain Capital]] Crypto, following an earlier round backed by [[Khosla Ventures]], and a further 135 million dollar token sale in May 2025 led by a16z and Bain Capital Crypto, taking total disclosed financing past 375 million dollars. It has enrolled over 17 million people, many in the Global South, where small cryptocurrency payments were offered in exchange for iris scans, against a stated long-term goal of one billion enrolled users.[^3][^8] + +### Deceptive Recruitment and the Global South + +A 2022 investigation by *MIT Technology Review*, based on interviews with more than thirty-five people across [[Indonesia]], [[Kenya]], [[Sudan]], [[Ghana]], [[Chile]], and [[Norway]], found that Worldcoin's field operations relied on deceptive marketing, collected more personal data than the company acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. Spanish-speaking recruits were handed terms-of-service notices in English, and people in Sudan were drawn in with giveaways of wireless earbuds without being told what the iris scan was for. The company used enrollees' sensitive biometric data to train artificial-intelligence models without their knowledge. The recruitment concentrated in countries with weaker data-protection law, paying poor people small amounts of cryptocurrency for a permanent biometric record, a pattern critics compared to the testing of surveillance technology on vulnerable populations. The whistleblower [[Edward Snowden]] warned in 2022 against the creation of a centralized global iris database.[^5][^6] + +The project also carries a structural conflict of interest. Altman's [[OpenAI]] builds the artificial intelligence that erodes the online distinction between humans and machines, while Worldcoin sells the proof-of-personhood remedy for the problem his other company creates, positioning a single principal to profit from both the disease and the cure of an AI-saturated internet.[^6] + +### Regulatory Bans and Privacy Findings + +The project has drawn regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions over its collection of biometric data. Kenya suspended sign-ups in August 2023, and in May 2025 the High Court ordered the company to delete all biometric data collected from Kenyans, a deletion confirmed complete in January 2026. The Bavarian data-protection authority, which oversees Worldcoin's European entity, ruled in December 2024 that its central storage of IrisCodes violated the General Data Protection Regulation and ordered compliant deletion. [[Spain]]'s agency imposed a three-month precautionary ban in March 2024, and Hong Kong's privacy commissioner ordered all operations to cease in May 2024 after finding six data-protection contraventions.[^4][^9] + +Brazil's data-protection authority banned the company in January 2025 from offering cryptocurrency or cash in exchange for biometric data, with a fine of fifty thousand reais a day for resuming, and Indonesia suspended its registration in May 2025; Colombia ordered an "immediate and definitive closure" in October 2025. Despite the scrutiny, the company launched in the United States in April 2025 across six cities, introduced a Visa-linked World Card, and announced partnerships with [[Tinder]], [[Zoom]], and [[Docusign]] to use World ID for human verification. Edward Snowden had warned of the project in October 2021, writing "Don't catalogue eyeballs" and "The human body is not a ticket-punch."[^1][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "US tech embraces Sam Altman's World iris-scan ID banned in places," *Rest of World,* 2026. https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/ +[^2]: "Worldcoin in Kenya," *TechCrunch,* August 15, 2023, on the Orb, Tools for Humanity, Altman and Blania, and the Kenya enrollment. https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/15/worldcoin-in-kenya +[^3]: "Billionaire Sam Altman's Iris Orb Dream," *Yahoo Finance,* on the funding from Khosla Ventures and others and the enrollment figures. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-sam-altmans-iris-orb-010120228.html +[^4]: "Sam Altman's iris-scanning Worldcoin temporarily banned in Spain," and the broader regulatory record across Kenya, Spain, Hong Kong, Portugal, Indonesia, Bavaria, and Brazil. *Silicon Republic.* https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/worldcoin-eyeball-scan-biometric-data-ban-sam-altman +[^5]: "Deception, exploited workers, and free cash: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users," *MIT Technology Review,* April 6, 2022. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ +[^6]: "What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It," *Time,* 2023, on the Snowden criticism and the proof-of-personhood rationale. https://time.com/6300522/worldcoin-sam-altman/ +[^7]: "Opening the Orb: A look inside Worldcoin's biometric imaging device," World Foundation engineering blog, on the NVIDIA Jetson carrier board and the IrisCode; and "Worldcoin's mainnet WLD token set to go live," *CoinDesk,* July 24, 2023. https://world.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device +[^8]: "Sam Altman's crypto project Worldcoin raises $115M led by Blockchain Capital," *CoinDesk,* May 25, 2023; and "World raises $135M," World blog, May 21, 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/05/25/sam-altmans-crypto-project-worldcoin-raises-115m-led-by-blockchain-capital +[^9]: "Worldcoin to delete Kenyan biometric data," *Techpoint Africa,* on the May 2025 High Court order; Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht press release, December 19, 2024, on the GDPR deletion order; Agencia Española de Protección de Datos press release, March 6, 2024; and Hong Kong PCPD statement, May 22, 2024. https://www.lda.bayern.de/media/pm/pm2024_08_en.pdf +[^10]: "Brazil halts Worldcoin from offering crypto for biometric data," *Cryptonews,* January 24, 2025; "Indonesia suspends World ID registration," *Cointelegraph,* May 2025; "Colombia orders closure of Worldcoin," *Finance Colombia,* October 3, 2025; and Snowden's October 23, 2021 warning, *Decrypt.* https://decrypt.co/84277/snowden-slams-sam-altman-worldcoin-eyeball-scan-for-crypto diff --git a/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/xAI.md b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/xAI.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3ecc372d --- /dev/null +++ b/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/xAI.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +category: "Private Organization" +tags: + - Organization + - xAI + - ElonMusk + - OpenAI + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Grok + - X +summary: "xAI is the artificial-intelligence company Elon Musk founded in 2023 after departing OpenAI, builder of the Grok model and the Colossus supercomputer, which merged with X in 2025, raised tens of billions of dollars, and whose founder sued OpenAI and Sam Altman over the abandonment of OpenAI's nonprofit mission." +location: "Bay Area, California, and Memphis, Tennessee" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +xAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded by [[Elon Musk]] in 2023, which builds the Grok family of large language models and the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk had cofounded [[OpenAI]] in 2015 and left its board in 2018; he launched xAI as a direct competitor and, in 2024, sued OpenAI and its chief executive [[Sam Altman]] for abandoning the nonprofit mission the two had set out to build. In March 2025 xAI acquired the social platform [[X (social media)|X]] in an all-stock deal, merging Musk's AI lab with the network he had bought as Twitter in 2022.[^1][^2] + +### Founding, Grok, and Colossus + +Musk incorporated xAI in March 2023 and announced it publicly on July 12, 2023, assembling a founding team of eleven researchers drawn from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, including the chief engineer Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher, and Jimmy Ba, a coauthor of the widely cited Adam optimization paper. The company stated its aim as building AI to "understand the true nature of the universe." It released its first model, Grok, in November 2023 on X, positioning the chatbot as a "maximally truth-seeking" assistant with real-time access to posts on the platform, and shipped successive versions, reaching Grok 4 by 2025.[^1][^3] + +To train its models xAI built Colossus, a supercomputing cluster in Memphis that came online in September 2024 with roughly 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processors and expanded toward 200,000 by early 2025, drawing scrutiny over its power consumption and the gas turbines installed to feed it. The buildout placed xAI among the largest consumers of AI compute in the world and required capital on a scale that drove the company's repeated multibillion-dollar fundraising.[^3][^4] + +### The Merger with X and the Fundraising + +On March 28, 2025 Musk announced that xAI had acquired X in an all-stock transaction, exchanging shares of both companies for shares of a new holding company, xAI Holdings Corp. Musk valued xAI at 80 billion dollars and X at 33 billion dollars, the latter figure derived from a 45-billion enterprise value less 12 billion in debt, and said the two companies' futures were now "intertwined." The merger folded the social platform, which Musk had bought as Twitter for 44 billion dollars in October 2022, into the AI company and gave xAI direct access to X's user base and data for training and distribution.[^2][^5] + +xAI raised capital aggressively to fund its compute. After earlier rounds, including a 6-billion-dollar raise that lifted its valuation to roughly 24 billion dollars, the company by late 2025 had taken in more than 20 billion dollars across primary funding alongside a multibillion-dollar debt facility arranged by Morgan Stanley. A December 2025 round drew participation from Nvidia, Valor Equity Partners, StepStone Group, Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital, with reporting putting the combined xAI-X entity's valuation well above 200 billion dollars.[^4][^6] + +### Musk's Lawsuit Against OpenAI + +In February 2024 Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and the cofounder [[Greg Brockman]] in California state court, alleging breach of contract and of the company's founding agreement, which he said committed OpenAI to developing artificial general intelligence as an open-source nonprofit "for the benefit of humanity" rather than for the profit of [[Microsoft]]. Musk, who had pledged early funding to OpenAI at its 2015 launch and served as cochair before leaving the board in 2018, framed the suit around the company's pivot to a capped-profit structure and its deepening Microsoft partnership. He withdrew the state suit in June 2024 and refiled in federal court.[^7][^8] + +The refiled federal complaint, later amended to name Microsoft as a defendant, alleged that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft and accused Altman of "rampant self-dealing," seeking damages and Altman's removal as chief executive and director; Musk amended the complaint so that any damages would flow to OpenAI's nonprofit rather than to himself. In May 2026 a nine-member advisory jury found that Musk had filed outside the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the case.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "xAI," Britannica Money, on the 2023 founding, the July 12, 2023 announcement, the founding team from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Tesla, and the Grok model. https://www.britannica.com/money/xAI +[^2]: "Elon Musk says xAI acquired X," *TechCrunch,* March 29, 2025, on the all-stock deal, the xAI Holdings Corp structure, and the 80-billion and 33-billion valuations. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/29/elon-musk-says-xai-acquired-x/ +[^3]: "All 11 xAI co-founders," The Next Web, on the eleven founding researchers including Igor Babuschkin and Jimmy Ba and their prior employers. https://thenextweb.com/news/xai-all-cofounders-departed-musk-spacex-rebuild +[^4]: "xAI revenue, valuation and funding," Sacra, on the Colossus buildout, the more-than-20-billion total raised, and the Morgan Stanley debt facility. https://sacra.com/c/xai/ +[^5]: "xAI Buys X: Why It Happened," FinTech Weekly, on the merger rationale and the Twitter acquisition history. https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/xai-acquires-x-twitter-merger-elon-musk-ai +[^6]: "Elon Musk's xAI raises $20 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round," *Gulf News,* 2025, on the December 2025 round and the Valor, StepStone, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital participation. https://gulfnews.com/business/markets/elon-musks-xai-raises-20-billion-in-nvidia-backed-funding-round-1.500400546 +[^7]: "Elon Musk sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over contract breach," *CNBC,* March 1, 2024, on the breach-of-contract claims, the founding agreement, and Musk's departure from the OpenAI board in 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/elon-musk-sues-openai-and-ceo-sam-altman-over-contract-breach.html +[^8]: "Jury dismisses all claims in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman," *NPR,* May 18, 2026, on the refiled federal suit, the Microsoft defendant amendment, the "self-dealing" allegation, and the May 2026 dismissal. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5822366/musk-altman-openai-jury-verdict-claims-dismissed diff --git a/30 - PROGRAMS & PROJECTS/SOFTWARE_PROJECTS/PROMIS.md b/30 - PROGRAMS & PROJECTS/SOFTWARE_PROJECTS/PROMIS.md index de7522ac..75627b03 100644 --- a/30 - PROGRAMS & PROJECTS/SOFTWARE_PROJECTS/PROMIS.md +++ b/30 - PROGRAMS & PROJECTS/SOFTWARE_PROJECTS/PROMIS.md @@ -21,9 +21,9 @@ location: "Washington, D.C." PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) was a pioneering case management software system developed in the 1970s and 80s by [[INSLAW|The Institute for Law and Social Research]] (INSLAW). The software was originally designed to help the [[U.S. Attorney's office]] in DC automate and streamline their case management processes. This expanded across the country and internationally. However, it later became embroiled in controversy, theft, and conspiracy theories. ### Origins and Development -In 1969, US Attorney [[Thomas A. Flannery]] perceived an urgent need for new techniques for dealing with the overwhelming amount of cases going through the [[U.S. Attorney's office|DC U.S. Attorney's Office]]. The [[Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia]] (funded by the [[LEAA|Law Enforcement Assistance Administration]] (LEAA)) gave a $60,000 grant (70-DF-047) to [[Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co]] that put together a team of lawyers, management analysts, criminologists, statisticians, and computer science specialists to development a computer-based information system for the prosecutor. +In 1969, US Attorney [[Thomas A. Flannery]] perceived an urgent need for new techniques for dealing with the overwhelming amount of cases going through the DC U.S. Attorney's Office. The [[Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia]] (funded by the [[LEAA|Law Enforcement Assistance Administration]] (LEAA)) gave a $60,000 grant (70-DF-047) to [[Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co]] that put together a team of lawyers, management analysts, criminologists, statisticians, and computer science specialists to development a computer-based information system for the prosecutor. -This team was headed by [[Joan E. Jacoby]] (then Director of the [[Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia]]) and [[Charles R. Work]] (then Deputy Chief of the Superior Court Division of the [[U.S. Attorney's office]]) with project manager [[Bill Hamilton]] (senior consultant at [[Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co]], formerly [[NSA]] analyst). Other team members included [[Sidney H. Brounstein]], [[Robert H. Cain]], [[Joyce H. Deroy]], [[James M. Etheridge]], [[John L. Gizzarelli]], [[Fred L. Lander III]], [[Soo Lee]], [[Dean C. Merrill]], [[John M. Middleton]], [[Stanley H. Turner]], [[Frederick G. Watts]], [[Dennis W. Wright]], and [[Robert Whitaker]]. The design work occupied approximately 14 months. +This team was headed by [[Joan E. Jacoby]] (then Director of the Office of Crime Analysis of the District of Columbia) and [[Charles R. Work]] (then Deputy Chief of the Superior Court Division of the U.S. Attorney's office) with project manager [[Bill Hamilton]] (senior consultant at Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co, formerly [[NSA]] analyst). Other team members included [[Sidney H. Brounstein]], [[Robert H. Cain]], [[Joyce H. Deroy]], [[James M. Etheridge]], [[John L. Gizzarelli]], [[Fred L. Lander III]], [[Soo Lee]], [[Dean C. Merrill]], [[John M. Middleton]], [[Stanley H. Turner]], [[Frederick G. Watts]], [[Dennis W. Wright]], and [[Robert Whitaker]]. The design work occupied approximately 14 months. The system came to be known as the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) and deployed on January 1, 1971 in Washington D.C. for the District Attorney's Office. @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ PROMIS had four basic subsystems: Report Generator, Forms Generator, Generalized The software operated in batch processing mode (no online capabilities) and was designed to run on LEAA's [[IBM]] mainframe. It used a flat file database structure, and had no online data entry or inquiry capabilities. Original PROMIS was written in PL/I but was reprogrammed to COBOL for subsequent versions. -Around 1973 (date unclear), [[Bill Hamilton]] and [[Nancy Hamilton]] founded [[INSLAW|The Institute of Law and Social Research]], a non profit think tank that was to be the steward of the PROMIS software. The LEAA declared PROMIS an "exemplary project" and further funded INSLAW to enhance PROMIS to make it a transferrable system that could be adopted by other jurisdictions. The LEAA also funded "transfers" for municipalities to adopt the PROMIS software. +Around 1973 (date unclear), Bill Hamilton and [[Nancy Hamilton]] founded The Institute of Law and Social Research, a non profit think tank that was to be the steward of the PROMIS software. The LEAA declared PROMIS an "exemplary project" and further funded INSLAW to enhance PROMIS to make it a transferrable system that could be adopted by other jurisdictions. The LEAA also funded "transfers" for municipalities to adopt the PROMIS software. This new version of the software was called PROMIS II. ### PROMIS II (mid-1970s) @@ -74,35 +74,41 @@ In March 1982, INSLAW signed a $10 million, three-year contract with the [[Depar DOJ withheld advance payments citing an unauthorized pledge of government invoices to a bank, a dispute INSLAW characterized as pretextual. Under financial duress, INSLAW filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985. The bankruptcy proceedings became a second front of litigation: INSLAW alleged that senior DOJ officials, including [[Lowell Jensen]] and acting under direction ultimately traceable to [[Edwin Meese]] and [[Earl Brian]], engineered the advance payment disputes specifically to drive the company into insolvency and enable the acquisition of its software at bankruptcy auction prices. -Bankruptcy Judge [[George Francis Bason, Jr.]] ruled in September 1987 that DOJ had "taken, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS by trickery, fraud, and deceit." The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed this ruling in 1989. The Court of Appeals reversed it in 1991 on jurisdictional grounds; the Supreme Court declined review. Full legal history is documented at [[INSLAW]] and [[PROMIS Software Scandal]].[^1][^2] +Bankruptcy Judge [[George Francis Bason, Jr.]] ruled in September 1987 that DOJ had "taken, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS by trickery, fraud, and deceit." The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed this ruling in 1989. The Court of Appeals reversed it in 1991 on jurisdictional grounds; the Supreme Court declined review. Full legal history is documented at INSLAW and PROMIS Software Scandal.[^1][^2] ### Danny Casolaro and "The Octopus" -Freelance journalist [[Danny Casolaro]] began investigating the [[PROMIS Software Scandal]] in 1990 after being contacted by [[INSLAW]] founder [[Bill Hamilton]].[^1] Casolaro believed the theft of PROMIS was one tentacle of a sprawling criminal conspiracy he called "[[The Octopus]]," which he believed linked U.S. intelligence agencies, international espionage and arms dealing, organized crime, drug cartels involved in the [[Iran-Contra Affair]], money laundering through [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International|BCCI]], and covert operations to manipulate foreign governments. He was working on a book titled "Behold, A Pale Horse" (later "The Octopus") encompassing these connected events.[^1] +Freelance journalist [[Danny Casolaro]] began investigating the PROMIS Software Scandal in 1990 after being contacted by INSLAW founder Bill Hamilton.[^1] Casolaro believed the theft of PROMIS was one tentacle of a sprawling criminal conspiracy he called "[[The Octopus]]," which he believed linked U.S. intelligence agencies, international espionage and arms dealing, organized crime, drug cartels involved in the [[Iran-Contra Affair]], money laundering through [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International|BCCI]], and covert operations to manipulate foreign governments. He was working on a book titled "Behold, A Pale Horse" (later "The Octopus") encompassing these connected events.[^1] -Casolaro was found dead on August 10, 1991, in his hotel room in [[Martinsburg, West Virginia]], his wrists slashed twelve times. His death was ruled a suicide. His research files on PROMIS and the Octopus were missing from the hotel room. The House Judiciary Committee recommended further investigation into the circumstances of his death. Full details are at [[Danny Casolaro]].[^2] +Casolaro was found dead on August 10, 1991, in his hotel room in [[Martinsburg, West Virginia]], his wrists slashed twelve times. His death was ruled a suicide. His research files on PROMIS and the Octopus were missing from the hotel room. The House Judiciary Committee recommended further investigation into the circumstances of his death, and the case was later the subject of the 2024 documentary series *American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders*. Full details are at Danny Casolaro.[^2][^8] ### The Backdoor Theory and International Proliferation Multiple sources allege that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies modified PROMIS with a hidden surveillance backdoor before distributing it to foreign governments, banks, and international organizations. The backdoor allegedly allowed intelligence services to remotely access the databases of PROMIS users and monitor their queries in real time. -[[Michael Riconosciuto]] claimed he was tasked with installing the backdoor at the [[Wackenhut Corporation|Wackenhut]]-[[Cabazon Indian Reservation|Cabazon]] joint venture in Indio, California, working from software obtained through [[Earl Brian]] and [[Peter Videnieks]]. A separate account, drawn from Israeli intelligence sources and reported in Gordon Thomas's *Gideon's Spies* (1999), holds that [[Rafael Eitan]] of [[LAKAM]] directed Israeli technicians to embed a "trapdoor" microchip in PROMIS after acquiring the software through back channels from the [[Department of Justice|DOJ]], with the modified software then distributed internationally through British media proprietor [[Robert Maxwell]] and his Israeli computer firm [[Degem]].[^3] +[[Michael Riconosciuto]] claimed he was tasked with installing the backdoor at the [[Wackenhut Corporation|Wackenhut]]-[[Cabazon Indian Reservation|Cabazon]] joint venture in Indio, California, working from software obtained through Earl Brian and Peter Videnieks. A separate account, drawn from Israeli intelligence sources and reported in Gordon Thomas's *Gideon's Spies* (1999), holds that [[Rafael Eitan]] of [[LAKAM]] directed Israeli technicians to embed a "trapdoor" microchip in PROMIS after acquiring the software through back channels from the DOJ, with the modified software then distributed internationally through British media proprietor [[Robert Maxwell]] and his Israeli computer firm [[Degem]].[^3] -Alleged foreign intelligence and law enforcement users of the backdoored PROMIS include agencies in [[Israel]], [[Canada]] (the [[Royal Canadian Mounted Police|RCMP]] and [[Canadian Security Intelligence Service|CSIS]]), the [[United Kingdom]], [[Australia]], [[South Korea]], [[Iraq]], [[Jordan]], [[Libya]], [[Poland]], [[South Africa]], and the [[Soviet Union]]. International financial institutions alleged to have received PROMIS-derived systems include [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International|BCCI]], [[Banco Nazionale del Lavoro]], the [[HSBC|Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation]], [[UBS|Union Bank of Switzerland]], and [[Bank of America]]. Total sales through the Maxwell network were alleged to exceed $500 million.[^3][^4] +Alleged foreign intelligence and law enforcement users of the backdoored PROMIS include agencies in [[Israel]], [[Canada]] (the [[Royal Canadian Mounted Police|RCMP]] and [[Canadian Security Intelligence Service|CSIS]]), the [[United Kingdom]], [[Australia]], [[South Korea]], [[Iraq]], [[Jordan]], [[Libya]], [[Poland]], [[South Africa]], and the [[Soviet Union]]. International financial institutions alleged to have received PROMIS-derived systems include BCCI, [[Banco Nazionale del Lavoro]], the [[HSBC|Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation]], [[UBS|Union Bank of Switzerland]], and [[Bank of America]]. Total sales through the Maxwell network were alleged to exceed $500 million.[^3][^4] The [[Bua Report]] (1993) and a subsequent DOJ review (1994) found no credible evidence that enhanced PROMIS was distributed internationally, concluding that only public-domain versions of the software had been shared with foreign entities.[^1] +The witnesses central to the foreign-distribution claims were assessed as unreliable. Michael Riconosciuto was arrested on drug charges eight days after submitting his March 1991 backdoor affidavit and was later convicted of distributing methamphetamine, a conviction that figured in evaluations of his credibility. Earl Brian denied involvement in any PROMIS scheme and was never charged in connection with it, though he was separately convicted in 1996 of unrelated financial fraud involving the [[Financial News Network]] and [[United Press International]]. Commentators writing after the 2013 disclosures about [[National Security Agency]] bulk surveillance described PROMIS as a conceptual forerunner of mass data integration, while cautioning that the specific trapdoor-distribution narrative remained unproven and rested on the same contested witnesses the official reviews had rejected.[^5][^6][^7] + ### Later Developments -In September 1987, Bankruptcy Judge [[George Francis Bason, Jr.]] ruled that DOJ had "taken, converted, stole" INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS. That ruling was affirmed by the D.C. Circuit Court in November 1989 but reversed on jurisdictional grounds by the Court of Appeals in May 1991. +In September 1987, Bankruptcy Judge George Francis Bason, Jr. ruled that DOJ had "taken, converted, stole" INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS. That ruling was affirmed by the D.C. Circuit Court in November 1989 but reversed on jurisdictional grounds by the Court of Appeals in May 1991. Bason had awarded INSLAW about 6.8 million dollars in damages, and he was not reappointed to the bankruptcy bench after his rulings against the department, an outcome the Hamiltons and congressional investigators viewed with suspicion; the district judge [[William Bryant]], upholding the findings in 1989, had described the support for them as convincing, perhaps compelling. The House Judiciary Committee launched a three-year investigation from 1989 to 1992, producing House Report 102-857 on September 10, 1992, which found "strong evidence" of DOJ theft and raised "serious concerns" about a high-level conspiracy. The report was unclassified and publicly available. Special Counsel [[Nicholas J. Bua]], appointed in November 1991, issued a 267-page report in March 1993 finding no credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing by any DOJ official. The Senate referred INSLAW's remaining claims to the Court of Federal Claims, which ruled in 1997-1998 that all PROMIS versions were in the public domain. -[[Bill Hamilton]] maintained INSLAW's claims publicly for decades after the formal proceedings concluded. The international backdoor distribution allegations - particularly those concerning [[Rafael Eitan]], [[Robert Maxwell]], and [[Degem]] - were never formally adjudicated. A 2001 report alleged that FBI double agent [[Robert Hanssen]] provided PROMIS-derived software to his Soviet KGB handlers.[^1][^2] +Bill Hamilton maintained INSLAW's claims publicly for decades after the formal proceedings concluded. The international backdoor distribution allegations - particularly those concerning Rafael Eitan, Robert Maxwell, and Degem - were never formally adjudicated. A 2001 report alleged that FBI double agent [[Robert Hanssen]] provided PROMIS-derived software to his Soviet KGB handlers.[^1][^2] ### Footnotes [^1]: U.S. Department of Justice. *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc.* March 1993. [^2]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. *The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report.* House Report 102-857, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, September 10, 1992. [^3]: Thomas, Gordon. *Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.* St. Martin's Press, 1999. -[^4]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* TrineDay, 1992. \ No newline at end of file +[^4]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* TrineDay, 1992. +[^5]: "The Deep, Meaningless Rabbithole of the Inslaw/PROMIS Affair," *Investigative Economics,* 2024, on Michael Riconosciuto's arrest eight days after his affidavit and his methamphetamine conviction. https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/the-deep-meaningless-rabbithole-of +[^6]: "Ex-Chief of Wire Service Convicted of Fraud Conspiracy," *The Washington Post,* October 1996, on Earl Brian's conviction for financial fraud involving the Financial News Network and United Press International. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/10/18/ex-chief-of-wire-service-convicted-of-fraud-conspiracy/314ff075-52fe-450b-8f47-b353898ccfe1/ +[^7]: "PRISM's Controversial Forerunner," *Consortium News,* 2013, on PROMIS as a conceptual forerunner of bulk data integration and the unproven trapdoor narrative. https://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/11/prisms-controversial-forerunner/ +[^8]: "The Mysterious Death of Danny Casolaro," *All That's Interesting,* on the August 1991 death, the missing notes, and the 2024 documentary *American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders*. https://allthatsinteresting.com/danny-casolaro \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Bollea v. Gawker.md b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Bollea v. Gawker.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..51ae3f65 --- /dev/null +++ b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Bollea v. Gawker.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +category: "Modern Incident" +tags: + - Event + - BolleaVGawker + - PeterThiel + - Gawker + - HulkHogan + - FirstAmendment + - Florida + - PressFreedom +alias: + - Hulk Hogan v. Gawker + - Gawker lawsuit + - Bollea v. Gawker Media +summary: Bollea v. Gawker Media was the 2016 Florida invasion-of-privacy trial in which Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) won a 140 million dollar verdict against Gawker Media over its 2012 publication of a sex tape, a judgment secretly funded by Peter Thiel that drove Gawker into bankruptcy and ended the outlet. +location: Pinellas County Circuit Court, St. Petersburg, Florida (Sixth Judicial Circuit) +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Bollea v. Gawker Media, LLC was a civil invasion-of-privacy action tried in the [[Pinellas County]] Circuit Court (Sixth Judicial Circuit) in [[St. Petersburg, Florida|St. Petersburg]], [[Florida]], in March 2016. The professional wrestler Terry Bollea, known professionally as [[Hulk Hogan]], sued [[Gawker Media]] over the October 2012 publication on the [[Gawker (website)|Gawker.com]] site of a one-minute, forty-second excerpt from a privately recorded sex tape. The jury returned a verdict of 115 million dollars in compensatory damages and 25 million dollars in punitive damages on March 18, 2016, totaling approximately 140 million dollars. The judgment drove Gawker Media into [[Chapter 11 bankruptcy|Chapter 11]] in June 2016 and ended the outlet. In May 2016, between the verdict and the bankruptcy, the *Forbes* reporter [[Steven Bertoni|Bertoni]] reported that [[Peter Thiel]] had secretly funded the litigation.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Publication and the Filing + +Gawker.com published the sex-tape excerpt on October 4, 2012, alongside a 1,300-word essay by the editor [[A.J. Daulerio]] defending the publication on newsworthiness grounds. The tape had been recorded several years earlier without Bollea's knowledge by the radio host [[Bubba the Love Sponge|Todd "Bubba the Love Sponge" Clem]], in whose home the encounter occurred, and a copy had been shopped to media outlets. Bollea demanded removal; Gawker declined. Bollea filed suit in the Pinellas County Circuit Court in late 2012, alleging invasion of privacy, infringement of the right of publicity, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seeking 100 million dollars.[^1][^4] + +The pretrial litigation ran for more than three years and turned on Gawker's First Amendment defenses, which the trial court (Judge [[Pamela Campbell]]) largely rejected. The [[Florida Second District Court of Appeal]] issued a key ruling in 2015 (Gawker Media, LLC v. Bollea, 2D15-2857) permitting the case to proceed to trial and denying Gawker's motion for summary judgment. The appellate record is published at [[Justia]].[^5] + +### The Thiel Funding and Charles Hard + +Thiel began funding the Bollea litigation in 2013 through an arrangement kept confidential until the *Forbes* report in May 2016. Thiel retained the lawyer [[Charles Hard]], a Florida First Amendment specialist who had previously represented Bollea in earlier matters, and covered the litigation costs through a vehicle that removed the ordinary settlement pressure on the plaintiff. The reported total of Thiel's spending on the litigation was approximately ten million dollars. The arrangement was structured so that Hard's firm took the case with the external funding in place, which meant Bollea did not have to settle to relieve himself of his own legal costs.[^2][^3] + +Thiel acknowledged the funding publicly in *Forbes* and in subsequent interviews, framing it as retaliation for Gawker's 2007 article outing him as gay and for the outlet's broader coverage of people in his network. Thiel stated he had identified Gawker as a target and had looked for cases in which Gawker could be sued, eventually settling on the Bollea sex-tape case as the strongest vehicle. The structure of a third-party billionaire funding a plaintiff's invasion-of-privacy suit against a media outlet through a dedicated legal vehicle, with no settlement incentive on the plaintiff, has no documented precedent in U.S. media litigation at this scale.[^2] + +### The Trial and the Verdict + +The trial began on March 4, 2016, before Judge Campbell and a six-person jury. Gawker's defense rested on the First Amendment and on Florida's newsworthiness standard, arguing that the publication of the tape was protected commentary on a public figure. The plaintiff's case argued that the tape was a private recording published without consent for page views and that Gawker had ignored repeated demands to remove it. Daulerio, the editor who had published the clip, testified and performed poorly under cross-examination, at one point stating that a celebrity sex tape would be newsworthy even if the subject was a child over the age of four, a statement the plaintiff's counsel used to devastating effect in closing.[^1][^4] + +The jury deliberated for approximately six hours and returned its verdict on March 18, 2016. The 115 million dollar compensatory award exceeded the 100 million dollars Bollea had sought. The jury added 25 million dollars in punitive damages, broken down among Gawker Media, its founder [[Nick Denton]], and Daulerio individually. The total verdict was reported as the largest privacy verdict in U.S. history at the time.[^1][^6] + +### Bankruptcy, Sale, and Settlement + +Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2016. The company's assets, including the Gawker.com domain and its archive, were acquired at auction by the [[Univision]] subsidiary [[Gizmodo Media Group]] for 135 million dollars. Univision did not continue Gawker.com as an operating site; the outlet effectively ceased. Denton and Daulerio were personally liable under the verdict for portions of the punitive award, and Daulerio, who lacked the assets to post the bond required to appeal, faced personal financial exposure until the settlement.[^1][^7] + +The litigation settled in November 2016 for approximately 31 million dollars, a fraction of the 140 million dollar verdict but sufficient to end the appeals and the bankruptcy proceedings. The settlement was brokered in the bankruptcy court. Bollea publicly confirmed the settlement amount. The settlement terminated the case without the appellate review that Gawker's counsel had sought and that First Amendment advocates had argued was needed to clarify the newsworthiness standard the verdict had applied.[^7] + +### Press-Freedom and First Amendment Response + +The verdict and the subsequent disclosure of the Thiel funding produced sustained condemnation from First Amendment and press organizations. The [[Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press]], the [[American Civil Liberties Union]], and a range of media-law scholars argued that the verdict, if upheld, would chill reporting on public figures, and that the covert third-party funding model Thiel had used could be deployed against any outlet that covered a sufficiently resourced principal. [[Terry Bollea|Bollea]]'s supporters argued that the publication of a nonconsensual sex tape was outside the First Amendment's protection regardless of the subject's public status, and that the funding mechanism was irrelevant to the merits.[^8] + +The [[First Amendment Watch]] project at [[New York University]] published a detailed deep-dive on the case, and the [[Tulane Law Review]] and the [[University of Miami Law Review]] each published scholarly analyses of the verdict's effect on media litigation. The case is now routinely cited in media-law curricula as the leading example of how a funded privacy verdict can terminate an outlet, and the term "Thiel-funded litigation" has entered the media-law vocabulary for the covert third-party funding model.[^8][^9][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Coverage of the *Bollea v. Gawker* trial, verdict, and aftermath in contemporaneous press, including the *New York Times*, *Washington Post*, and *CNN*, March through November 2016. +[^2]: Bertoni, Steven. "How Peter Thiel Hacked The Media." *Forbes,* May 25, 2016. The *Forbes* report first disclosed the Thiel funding of the Bollea litigation. +[^3]: Thiel, Peter. Interview acknowledging the Gawker litigation funding. *The New York Times,* 2016, and subsequent interviews. +[^4]: For the October 2012 publication and the pretrial posture, see the First Amendment Watch deep-dive and contemporaneous *Gawker* coverage. +[^5]: *Gawker Media, LLC v. Bollea*, 2D15-2857 (Fla. 2d DCA 2015). Published at Justia: https://law.justia.com/cases/florida/second-district-court-of-appeal/2015/2d15-2857.html +[^6]: "$25M Punitive Verdict Pushes Award to $140M in Hulk Hogan-Gawker Sex Tape Trial." CVN Blog, 2016. https://blog.cvn.com/25m-punitive-verdict-pushes-award-to-140m-in-hulk-hogan-gawker-sex-tape-trial +[^7]: Settlement and Univision acquisition coverage, *New York Times* and *Wall Street Journal*, June through November 2016. +[^8]: First Amendment Watch. "Hulk Hogan v. Gawker: Invasion of Privacy, Free Speech in a Digital World." https://firstamendmentwatch.org/deep-dive/hulk-hogan-v-gawker-invasion-of-privacy-free-speech-in-a-digital-world/ +[^9]: "Media Litigation in a Post-Gawker World." *Tulane Law Review,* Vol. 93, Issue 5. https://www.tulanelawreview.com/pub/volume93/issue5/medialitigationinapostgawkerworld +[^10]: "Eat Your Vitamins and Say Your Prayers: The First Amendment Implications of Bollea v. Gawker." *University of Miami Law Review,* Vol. 72, Issue 1. https://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr/vol72/iss1/7/ diff --git a/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Gamergate.md b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Gamergate.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e55cd693 --- /dev/null +++ b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Gamergate.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +category: "Modern Incident" +tags: + - Event + - Gamergate + - 4chan + - 8chan + - AltRight + - OnlineHarassment + - Disinformation + - 2014 + - ChanCulture +alias: + - GamerGate + - GG +summary: "Gamergate was a loosely organized online harassment campaign that began in August 2014 on 4chan and 8chan under the pretext of 'ethics in video game journalism,' whose coordinated harassment tactics and propaganda methods were subsequently adopted by the alt-right and the 2016 Trump campaign." +start: 2014-08 +end: 2015-01 +location: "4chan, 8chan, Reddit, Twitter (distributed)" +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +Gamergate was a loosely organized online harassment campaign that began in August 2014 on the imageboard [[4chan]] and its more extreme offshoot [[8chan]], nominally organized around the pretext of "ethics in video game journalism." The campaign's actual documented activity was the sustained harassment, doxxing, and threat-making against women in the video game industry and adjacent cultural sectors, beginning with the developer [[Zoe Quinn]] and expanding to include the critic [[Anita Sarkeesian]], the developer [[Brianna Wu]], and others. The tactics developed during Gamergate, including coordinated swarm harassment, weaponized doxxing, and the framing of reactionary cultural politics as a consumer-protection movement, were subsequently adopted by the [[alt-right]] and by the media infrastructure of the 2016 [[Donald Trump]] campaign. The campaign is now treated in academic and press analysis as the rehearsal for the disinformation and radicalization methods that defined the 2016 and 2020 U.S. electoral cycles.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Origins: The Zoe Post and the 4chan Mobilization + +The campaign began on August 16, 2014, when [[Eron Gjoni]] published a lengthy blog post titled "The Zoe Post," alleging that his former girlfriend, the game developer Zoe Quinn, had been unfaithful. Gjoni promoted the post on the [[Something Awful|Something Awful forums]], [[Penny Arcade|Penny Arcade forums]], and 4chan, where it was taken up by the /v/ (video games) and /pol/ (politically incorrect) boards. Within days, the framing had shifted from the personal dispute to a purported consumer movement about "ethics in video game journalism," predicated on the false claim that Quinn had received favorable coverage in exchange for a relationship with a journalist.[^1][^4] + +The [[Christopher Poole|moot]] (4chan founder) decision in September 2014 to ban Gamergate discussion on 4chan produced a mass migration to 8chan, the more permissive imageboard created by [[Frederick Brennan|Jim Watkins and Frederick Brennan]]. 8chan became the operational center of the campaign, and the migration is when the campaign's infrastructure moved from a moderated platform to an unmoderated one. 8chan subsequently became the hosting platform for the manifestos of the [[Christchurch mosque shootings|2019 Christchurch shooter]], the [[Poway synagogue shooting|2019 Poway shooter]], and the [[El Paso Walmart shooting|2019 El Paso shooter]], and the platform's role as an accelerationist and mass-casualty propaganda hub was a direct downstream consequence of the Gamergate-era migration.[^5][^6] + +### The Harassment Tactics and the Targets + +The campaign's operational tactics were the documented innovation. The coordinated swarm harassment (organized on 8chan and [[IRC]] channels, directed at specific targets on [[Twitter]] and via personal contacts), the doxxing (publication of home addresses and personal information), the swatting (false emergency reports triggering armed police responses), and the death and rape threats were applied systematically to Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu, forcing all three to flee their homes. The campaign's propagandists developed the technique of operating under the consumer-protection and ethics framing in public-facing communications while conducting the harassment on the back-channel platforms, a dual-track structure that became the template for subsequent right-wing online operations.[^1][^3] + +Sarkeesian, who ran the feminist video-game criticism channel [[Feminist Frequency]], had been a target of coordinated harassment since 2012 over her [[Tropes vs. Women in Video Games|Tropes vs. Women in Video Games]] Kickstarter campaign. The Gamergate campaign intensified the existing harassment and extended it to a broader population of women developers, critics, and journalists. The [[Data & Society Research Institute|Data & Society]] research report on media manipulation and disinformation (2017) analyzed Gamergate as the foundational instance of the far-right's exploitation of young-male grievance and anti-"political correctness" sentiment as a recruiting pipeline.[^3] + +### The Amplifiers: Yiannopoulos, Cernovich, and Breitbart + +[[Milo Yiannopoulos]], then a writer at [[Breitbart News]], became the campaign's principal media amplifier, publishing a series of Breitbart articles that framed Gamergate as a consumer revolt against corrupt journalism and that promoted the campaign's targets to his audience. Yiannopoulos's Breitbart coverage was the channel through which the campaign entered mainstream conservative media, and the subsequent [[BuzzFeed News|BuzzFeed]] reporting on the internal Breitbart emails (the "[[Stephen Bannon|Steve Bannon]] emails") documented the explicit editorial strategy of using Gamergate to recruit young men into the alt-right coalition.[^2][^7] + +[[Mike Cernovich]] leveraged Gamergate to build his media influence, operating the [[Dangerous Play]] and [[Cernovich Media]] properties and subsequently becoming a prominent pro-Trump media figure in 2016. The Yiannopoulos-Cernovich-Breitbart infrastructure, built and audience-tested during Gamergate, became the media backbone of the alt-right and the early Trump campaign's social-media operation. [[Steve Bannon]], who took over Breitbart after [[Andrew Breitbart]]'s death in 2012 and who became Trump's campaign CEO in August 2016, told [[Bloomberg Businessweek|Bloomberg Businessweek]] in 2016 that the Trump campaign's ability to reach the Gamergate audience through Breitbart was a foundation of the campaign's digital operation.[^2][^7] + +### The Alt-Right and the 2016 Trump Campaign + +The [[Guardian]] piece "What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'" (December 2016) is the foundational analytical document on the bridge. The article traces the direct transfer of personnel, tactics, and platforms from Gamergate to the alt-right and to the 2016 Trump campaign: the 8chan and /pol/ boards that hosted Gamergate coordination became the boards that hosted the pro-Trump meme operation and the [[Pizzagate|Pizzagate]] narrative in 2016; the Yiannopoulos-Breitbart infrastructure that amplified Gamergate became the same infrastructure that amplified Trump; the coordinated swarm-harassment tactics developed against Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu were applied to journalists covering Trump.[^2] + +[[Dale Beran|Dale Beran's]] 2016 and 2017 [[Medium|Medium]] analysis ("4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump" and "Why does 8chan Exist at All") is the complementary primary-analytical document. Beran traces the 4chan imageboard culture's evolution from the [[Anonymous (collective)|Anonymous]] hacktivism of the late 2000s through the Gamergate radicalization to the Trump meme army, documenting the through-line that connects the 2008 [[Anonymous|Anonymous vs. Scientology]] operation to the 2016 [[Pepe the Frog|Pepe]]-and-Pizzagate Trump digital army.[^5][^8] + +### Academic and Analytical Reception + +[[Marwick, Alice and Rebecca Lewis|Marwick and Lewis]]'s *Data & Society* report "Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online" (2017) analyzed Gamergate as the foundational instance of the online-harassment-as-political-tactic model. The report documented the far-right's exploitation of young-male grievance and anti-"political correctness" sentiment as a recruiting pipeline, and it traced the tactical innovations (coordinated swarm harassment, dual-track propaganda with ethics framing on the front channel and harassment on the back channel) that the campaign developed.[^3] + +The [[University of Missouri-St. Louis|University of Missouri-St. Louis]] *[[Pillars of Gamergate|Pillars of Gamergate]]* analysis examined the competing narratives around the campaign (the supporters' "ethics in journalism" framing versus the critics' harassment characterization) and documented the gap between the stated public-facing purpose and the actual operational behavior. The Guardian December 2016 piece "What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'" extended the analysis into the direct tactical and personnel transfer from Gamergate to the alt-right and the Trump campaign.[^2] + +Dale Beran's 2019 book *[[It Came From Something Awful|It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office]]* is the comprehensive analytical treatment. Beran traces the 4chan imageboard culture's evolution from the Anonymous hacktivism of the late 2000s through the Gamergate radicalization to the Pepe the Frog-and-Pizzagate Trump digital army. The imageboard-to-politics pipeline Beran documents runs from Something Awful through 4chan to 8chan to the 2016 campaign, with Gamergate at the midpoint.[^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: For the Gamergate chronology and the documented harassment record, see the contemporaneous press (the *New York Times*, *The Guardian*, *Wired*) and the academic analyses including the *Pillars of Gamergate* (University of Missouri-St. Louis). +[^2]: "What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'." *The Guardian,* December 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump +[^3]: Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. "Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online." *Data & Society Research Institute,* 2017. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf +[^4]: For the "Zoe Post" and the documented origins, see the r/GamerGhazi timeline (Reddit, 2015) and the contemporaneous press. +[^5]: Beran, Dale. "Why does 8chan Exist at All?" *Medium,* 2019. https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/why-does-8chan-exist-at-all-33a8942dbeb2 ; Beran, Dale. *It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office.* St. Martin's Press, 2019. +[^6]: For the 8chan hosting of the 2019 mass-casualty manifestos, see the contemporaneous press and the 8chan documentation in the vault. +[^7]: For the Yiannopoulos-Breitbart internal emails and the Bannon strategy, see the *BuzzFeed News* reporting on the Breitbart cache (2017) and the *Bloomberg Businessweek* profile of Bannon (2016). +[^8]: Beran, Dale. "4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump." *Medium,* 2016. diff --git a/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/London Conference on Intelligence.md b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/London Conference on Intelligence.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..46510e22 --- /dev/null +++ b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/London Conference on Intelligence.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +category: "Modern Incident" +tags: + - Event + - LondonConferenceOnIntelligence + - Eugenics + - RaceScience + - HumanBiodiversity + - AcademicFreedom +alias: + - LCI +summary: "The London Conference on Intelligence was a secret invitation-only eugenics conference held at University College London from 2014 to 2017, organized by James Thompson and dominated by figures tied to the Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly, exposed in 2018 in a scandal that ended several academic careers." +location: "London, England" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) was a secret, invitation-only conference on human intelligence, including race and intelligence and eugenics, held at [[University College London]] (UCL) from 2014 to 2017. It was organized by the UCL honorary lecturer [[James Thompson]], who booked rooms quietly and without the university's knowledge or approval, and its speakers were dominated by figures tied to the [[Pioneer Fund]], the [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]], and the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]]. Exposed by a student newspaper in early 2018, it became the most visible instance of organized academic eugenics in the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] network.[^1][^2] + +### Organization and Participants + +Thompson convened the conference annually and circulated invitations privately. An analysis of the programs found that 82 percent of those who spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 meetings were associated with the Ulster Institute, run by the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]], or with Mankind Quarterly. Participants included [[Emil Kirkegaard]], who runs the non-peer-reviewed [[OpenPsych]] paper repository, the Cambridge researcher [[Noah Carl]], the psychologist [[Michael Woodley of Menie]], and [[Kevin MacDonald]], described by the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] as a favored academic of the neo-Nazi movement. Several attendees had documented ties to white-nationalist and neo-Nazi circles.[^1][^3] + +The named editions ran in 2015, 2016, and 2017, with the conference first convening in 2014; the 2017 program comprised 22 talks across three days, May 12 to 14. Other attendees included the Danish psychologist [[Helmuth Nyborg]], who appeared in 2015 and 2016, the Mankind Quarterly co-editor and Pioneer Fund director [[Gerhard Meisenberg]], and [[Andrew Sabisky]], who later became a Downing Street adviser to [[Dominic Cummings]] before resigning in February 2020 over his published comments endorsing eugenics and claiming that black Americans have lower average intelligence. Kirkegaard's presence drew particular attention because he had published online posts rationalizing aspects of child sexual abuse.[^5][^6] + +### Exposure and Fallout + +The student newspaper *London Student* exposed the conference on January 10, 2018. UCL opened an investigation and barred Thompson from convening further events on campus, and he moved into retirement. The journalist [[Toby Young]] resigned from the newly created Office for Students on the day his attendance at a related eugenics event was revealed. The following year UCL completed its inquiry, and the University of Cambridge terminated the research fellowship of Noah Carl after a campaign over his association with the conference and his publications on race. The episode documented the persistence of a Pioneer Fund-linked eugenics-research network inside mainstream British academia.[^2][^4] + +UCL had granted Thompson honorary status and let him book rooms as external events without vetting the speakers or content, a process breach the university acknowledged in its January 2018 statement. The investigation report was published in 2020, but the parallel UCL Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics, whose report appeared in February 2020, fractured publicly when nine of its sixteen members refused to sign the final document, arguing it had failed to address the conference and to confront the institution's eugenics legacy connected to [[Francis Galton]] and [[Karl Pearson]], whose names UCL removed from a lecture theatre and buildings in 2020. The affair continued to generate freedom-of-information disputes over the suppressed details of the inquiry.[^5][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Exposed: London's secretive eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links," *London Student,* January 2018. https://medium.com/@londonstudent18/exposed-londons-secretive-eugenics-conference-and-its-neo-nazi-links-cd758a0a52b4 +[^2]: "London Conference on Intelligence exposes link between academic promotion of eugenics and Conservative right," TruePublica, 2018. https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/london-conference-intelligence-exposes-link-academic-promotion-eugenics-conservative-right/ +[^3]: "UK sociologist Noah Carl and the cultivation of the far right in academia," World Socialist Web Site, June 20, 2019. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/20/euge-j20.html +[^4]: "No, objecting to Cambridge's appointment of a eugenicist is not about free speech," *New Statesman,* December 2018. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/12/no-objecting-cambridge-s-appointment-eugenicist-not-about-free-speech +[^5]: "Secret Eugenics Conference Uncovered at University College London," *The Scientist,* and the Wikipedia summary of the London Conference on Intelligence used to locate primaries, on the 2014-2017 editions, the 2017 program of 22 talks over May 12-14, and attendees including Helmuth Nyborg, Gerhard Meisenberg, and Andrew Sabisky. https://www.the-scientist.com/secret-eugenics-conference-uncovered-at-university-college-london-30423 +[^6]: "Boris Johnson Aide Sabisky Resigns Over Race, IQ Comments," *TIME,* February 17, 2020, on Sabisky's appointment under Dominic Cummings and his resignation over eugenics statements. https://time.com/5785400/boris-johnson-andrew-sabisky-race/ +[^7]: "UCL denames buildings named after eugenicists," UCL News, June 19, 2020, on the Galton and Pearson denaming and the February 28, 2020 eugenics-inquiry report. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/ucl-denames-buildings-named-after-eugenicists \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/NLRB Data Exfiltration.md b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/NLRB Data Exfiltration.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..097e2d3c --- /dev/null +++ b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/NLRB Data Exfiltration.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "Modern Incident" +tags: + - Event + - NLRB + - DOGE + - DanielBerulis + - Whistleblower + - DataExfiltration + - Russia + - ElonMusk + - UnionData +alias: + - NLRB data breach + - Berulis disclosure +summary: The NLRB data exfiltration was a 2025 incident in which Department of Government Efficiency engineers accessed National Labor Relations Board systems and exfiltrated large volumes of sensitive data on union organizing and labor complaints, followed by multiple blocked login attempts from a Russian IP address, disclosed by NLRB cybersecurity whistleblower Daniel Berulis in April 2025. +start: 2025 +location: National Labor Relations Board (federal systems) +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +The NLRB data exfiltration was a 2025 incident in which engineers from the [[Department of Government Efficiency|Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)]] accessed [[National Labor Relations Board|National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)]] systems and exfiltrated large volumes of sensitive data including union-organizing and labor-complaint records. The exfiltration was followed by multiple blocked login attempts to NLRB systems from an IP address in [[Russia|Russia]], raising the documented concern that the exfiltrated data had been exposed to foreign adversaries. [[Daniel Berulis|Daniel Berulis]], an NLRB cybersecurity staffer, disclosed the incident in a sworn affidavit in April 2025, represented by [[Andrew Bakaj|Andrew Bakaj]] of [[Whistleblower Aid|Whistleblower Aid]].[^1][^2][^3] + +### The DOGE Access and the Data Exfiltration + +Berulis documented in his sworn affidavit that DOGE engineers accessed NLRB systems using methods his affidavit characterized as secretive and suspicious. The access coincided with unusual large data outflows from NLRB systems. The exfiltrated data included records related to union-organizing campaigns and labor complaints, which is the NLRB's core case-management data and which contains identifying information on workers involved in organizing activity, the employers they filed against, and the status of the cases.[^1][^2][^4] + +The data outflow was documented in the NLRB's own system logs, which Berulis reviewed as part of his cybersecurity role. The volume and pattern of the outflows were inconsistent with normal NLRB operations, and the DOGE engineers' access methods (which Berulis described as bypassing normal access controls) were inconsistent with the standard federal-system-access protocols. The [[Krebs on Security|Krebs on Security]] reporting (April 2025) provided the technical detail on the outflow pattern and the access methods.[^2] + +### The Russian IP Access Attempts + +Following the DOGE access, NLRB systems logged multiple blocked login attempts from an IP address in Russia. The timing of the Russian attempts (immediately following the DOGE exfiltration) and the targeting of the systems DOGE had accessed produced the documented concern that the exfiltrated data had been transmitted to or made accessible to a Russian endpoint. The [[Nextgov/FCW|Nextgov/FCW]] reporting (April 2025) documented the Russian IP attempts and their temporal relationship to the DOGE access.[^3][^5] + +The Russian IP access attempts are the documented datum that connects the [[Elon Musk|Elon Musk]]-led DOGE to the broader [[Jonathan Buma|Buma]]-documented pattern of Russian-intelligence interest in U.S. technology and government principals. The Buma disclosures (May 2025) on the GRU targeting of Musk, the documented Musk-[[Vladimir Putin|Putin]] contact channel (WSJ October 2024), and the NLRB Russian-IP attempts together constitute the evidentiary set on the question of Russian access to federal data through the DOGE channel.[^6] + +### The Berulis Disclosure and the Aftermath + +Berulis came forward in April 2025 with a sworn affidavit through Whistleblower Aid, represented by chief counsel Andrew Bakaj. [[NPR|NPR]], [[PBS NewsHour|PBS NewsHour]], Krebs on Security, and Nextgov/FCW each published detailed reporting on the disclosure in April 2025. [[VitalLaw|VitalLaw]] characterized the incident as an "alarming data breach" that "might have exposed agency data to foreign adversaries."[^1][^2][^3][^4][^5] + +After Musk publicly called Berulis a criminal on [[X (social media)|X]], Berulis's brake lines were cut. Berulis is suing Musk for defamation. The physical intimidation of a federal cybersecurity whistleblower who disclosed the Russian-IP-connected exfiltration of union-organizing data is part of the documented aftermath of the disclosure.[^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data." *NPR,* April 15, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security +[^2]: "Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data." *Krebs on Security,* April 2025. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-siphoned-nlrb-case-data/ +[^3]: "User with Russian IP address tried to log into NLRB systems following DOGE access, whistleblower says." *Nextgov/FCW,* April 2025. https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-ip-address-tried-log-nlrb-systems-following-doge-access-whistleblower-says/404574/ +[^4]: "DOGE Caused 'Alarming' Data Breach at NLRB, Whistleblower Says." *VitalLaw,* April 2025. https://www.vitallaw.com/news/doge-caused-alarming-data-breach-at-nlrb-whistleblower-says/cspd0179fa3355f64546db87b404df22f7725f +[^5]: "DOGE's Unlawful Plundering of Agency Systems." *Whistleblower Aid.* http://whistlebloweraid.org/case-study/doges-unlawful-plundering-of-agency-systems/ +[^6]: "FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia." *The Guardian,* May 22, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/fbi-whistleblower-musk-russia ; "Elon Musk's secret talks with Putin ramped up during his Twitter takeover: WSJ report." *CNBC,* October 25, 2024, on the *Wall Street Journal* report of Musk's regular contact with Putin since late 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/25/elon-musk-and-putin-talks-ramped-up-during-twitter-takeover-wsj.html +[^7]: "Musk, DOGE, and the Whistleblower's Lawsuit Over Cut Brakes." *FindLaw,* 2026, on Berulis's defamation suit against Musk and the tampered brake lines following Musk's April 2025 X posts. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/musk-doge-and-the-whistleblowers-lawsuit-over-cut-brakes/ diff --git a/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Singularity Summit.md b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Singularity Summit.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ef77296e --- /dev/null +++ b/40 - EVENTS/MODERN_INCIDENTS/Singularity Summit.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +category: "Modern Incident" +tags: + - Event + - SingularitySummit + - PeterThiel + - Transhumanism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - MIRI + - Rationalism +summary: "The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil, that ran through 2012 as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute before the brand was sold to Singularity University in 2013." +location: "Stanford, California (2006); rotating sites" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by [[Peter Thiel]], [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]]. The inaugural event was held at [[Stanford University]], and over the following six years the summit grew into a prominent gathering for futurists, transhumanists, and artificial-intelligence researchers. It served as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]) and as the early convening surface of the [[Rationalist Community]].[^1][^2] + +### Thiel's Funding and Platform + +Thiel began funding Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute in 2005 and cofounded the summit the next year. He delivered keynote addresses and was the institute's most prominent backer through the summit's run, with cumulative donations later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars. The summit gave Thiel a recurring public stage adjacent to the AI-risk and life-extension communities and helped concentrate the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] rationalist scene in its formative years. The roster of speakers across the summit's life spanned scientists, technologists, and transhumanist figures, including Kurzweil, the cognitive scientist [[Douglas Hofstadter]], and the inventor and entrepreneur cohort around the institute.[^2][^3] + +After the 2006 Stanford debut the conference moved to San Francisco in 2007 and San Jose in 2008, then began alternating between the Bay Area and New York, with the 2009 and 2011 editions held in New York City and the rest on the West Coast. The 2009 summit at New York's 92nd Street Y featured a "Changing the World" panel pairing Thiel with Yudkowsky and the biogerontologist [[Aubrey de Grey]] on philanthropy and proactive world-changing. Speakers across the years included the philosopher [[David Chalmers]], the AI researcher [[Ben Goertzel]], and the science-fiction author [[Vernor Vinge]], whose 1993 essay had popularized the term "technological singularity."[^5][^6] + +### Sale and Aftermath + +The final summit ran October 13 to 14, 2012, at the Masonic Center in San Francisco, drawing more than 600 attendees, with Kurzweil delivering the keynote and Thiel speaking on "Back to the Future." The lineup that year included the psychologist [[Steven Pinker]], the autism researcher [[Temple Grandin]], the 23andMe cofounder [[Linda Avey]], the Google research director [[Peter Norvig]], and the skeptic [[James Randi]]. Singularity University announced its acquisition of the summit in December 2012.[^5] + +In January 2013 the Singularity Institute completed the sale of the Singularity Summit and the "Singularity" name to Kurzweil's [[Singularity University]], and the research organization renamed itself the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, narrowing its public profile to technical AI-alignment work. Thiel's interest in the project cooled over the following years, and in 2025 he publicly denounced Yudkowsky, naming him as an example of the technology-stopping figure his [[Antichrist]] lectures warned against.[^1][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Intelligence.org (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), "Singularity Summit" archive. https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/ +[^2]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford. +[^3]: "Peter Thiel (Funder)," reported cumulative donations to the Singularity Institute exceeding 1.6 million dollars; cross-referenced against the MIRI donation timeline at timelines.issarice.com. +[^4]: "Peter Thiel Thinks the Antichrist Is 'Someone Like' This AI Doomer That He Funded," *Gizmodo,* October 2025. https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-thinks-the-antichrist-is-someone-like-this-ai-doomer-that-he-funded-2000671027 +[^5]: "Singularity Summit 2012 Is Coming To San Francisco October 13-14," *Singularity Hub,* August 29, 2012, on the Masonic Center venue, the 600-plus attendance, the Kurzweil keynote, the Thiel "Back to the Future" talk, and the speaker roster; and the December 2012 Singularity University acquisition announcement. https://singularityhub.com/2012/08/29/singularity-summit-2012-is-coming-to-san-francisco-october-13-14/ +[^6]: "Singularity Summit 2009 In New York October 3-4," *Singularity Hub,* July 23, 2009, on the 92nd Street Y venue and the Thiel, Yudkowsky, and Aubrey de Grey "Changing the World" panel; and the year-by-year venue rotation. https://singularityhub.com/2009/07/23/singularity-summit-2009-in-new-york-october-3-4/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Cypherpunks.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Cypherpunks.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..329ef8de --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Cypherpunks.md @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Cypherpunks + - Cryptography + - CryptoAnarchy + - Privacy + - DigitalCash + - Cryptocurrency +alias: + - Cypherpunk + - Cypherpunk movement + - Cypherpunks mailing list +summary: "The cypherpunks were a cryptography-and-privacy movement organized around a mailing list founded in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore, whose advocacy of strong encryption and digital cash against state control ran forward into Bitcoin and WikiLeaks." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The cypherpunks were a loose movement of cryptographers, programmers, and privacy activists who held that individuals should use strong encryption to defend privacy and resist state surveillance and control of money. The movement coalesced around a mailing list founded in 1992 by the mathematician [[Eric Hughes]], the former [[Intel]] engineer [[Timothy May]], and the [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]] cofounder [[John Gilmore]]. Its program combined anonymous communication, digital signatures, and untraceable electronic money, and its members designed the digital-cash schemes that preceded [[Bitcoin]]. The list overlapped heavily with the [[Extropianism|extropian]] subculture, and the WikiLeaks founder [[Julian Assange]] was an early member.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Origins + +In late 1992 May, Hughes, and Gilmore invited about twenty programmers and cryptographers to Hughes's house in [[Oakland]], California, after a series of informal Bay Area gatherings. Hughes set up an email list to reach interested parties beyond the Bay Area, hosted on the server that ran Gilmore's toad.com. At an early meeting the writer [[Jude Milhon]], who published in [[Mondo 2000]] under the name "St. Jude," coined the term "cypherpunks" as a play on the cyberpunk science-fiction genre. The list grew to roughly 700 subscribers by 1994 and around 2,000 by 1997.[^1][^3] + +The first physical meeting ran a "crypto-anarchy game" in which May handed out role cards for an FBI agent, an NSA agent, and ordinary citizens to act out the dynamics of surveillance and encrypted communication. Beyond the central email list the group built privacy tools in practice, running chains of anonymous remailers, most prominently the Cypherpunk and later Mixmaster designs descended from Gilmore and Hughes's early work, so that messages could be stripped of routing information and bounced through multiple operators before delivery. May's Cyphernomicon, the long FAQ he wrote for the list in 1994, served as its reference document and was hosted by Gilmore's company Cygnus Solutions.[^1][^10] + +### The Manifestos + +May had already written "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988 and distributed it at the Crypto '88 and Hackers conferences, circulating it again to the new list in 1992. It opened "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy," and argued that cryptography would alter the power of corporations and governments over economic transactions much as printing had reduced the power of medieval guilds. In March 1993 Hughes published "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," which declared that "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age" and that "Cypherpunks write code," committing the movement to building privacy tools rather than lobbying for them.[^2][^4] + +Hughes's manifesto drew a distinction between privacy and secrecy, defining privacy as "the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world" and arguing that "we cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence," so privacy had to be built into software by those who wanted it. The "write code" ethos set the cypherpunks apart from policy-focused privacy advocates and produced a stream of working tools, from remailers and encryption software to the digital-cash experiments. May's 1994 [[The Cyphernomicon|Cyphernomicon]], a long FAQ written for the list, set out the fuller body of crypto-anarchist thought, including his [[BlackNet]] thought experiment for an anonymous information market.[^5][^13] + +### Crypto-Anarchy and Digital Cash + +The cypherpunks drew on the blind-signature digital-cash work of the cryptographer [[David Chaum]], whose DigiCash company Hughes had studied in the Netherlands, and pushed toward money that no government could trace or regulate. Chaum's blind signature, set out in his 1982 paper, let a bank certify a coin without seeing its serial number, so payments stayed anonymous while remaining unforgeable, and his eCash product launched through DigiCash in the mid-1990s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1998, undone by its dependence on banks and the centralized issuer that controlled the ledger, a weakness the later designs set out to remove.[^14] + +Several list members and overlapping extropians produced the direct precursors to cryptocurrency: [[Nick Szabo]]'s "bit gold," [[Hal Finney]]'s reusable proof-of-work, [[Adam Back]]'s Hashcash, and [[Wei Dai]]'s "b-money." The pseudonymous [[Satoshi Nakamoto]] cited b-money and Hashcash in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper, which was first announced to a cryptography mailing list descended from the cypherpunk milieu, and Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto in January 2009.[^3][^6][^7] + +### The Crypto Wars + +Through the 1990s the cypherpunks fought United States export controls that classified strong cryptography as a munition under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Clinton administration's 1993 "Clipper chip" proposal for key-escrow encryption, under which the government would hold a copy of every key. The campaign mixed litigation with deliberate provocations: activists printed the RSA algorithm on T-shirts and in a machine-readable book to test whether publishing code counted as exporting a weapon, and Zimmermann's MIT Press release of the PGP source code as a printed book in 1995 was designed to invoke First Amendment protection for the printed word.[^1][^3] + +The decisive case was Bernstein v. United States, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the mathematician Daniel Bernstein, in which a federal court ruled in 1996 that source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the export licensing scheme was an unconstitutional prior restraint. The Department of Justice investigated Zimmermann from 1993 for "munitions export without a license" over PGP's spread overseas and dropped the case without charges in January 1996, and the Clipper chip proposal collapsed after the cryptographer Matt Blaze exposed a flaw in its escrow protocol in 1994. The Clinton administration substantially relaxed the export rules in 2000.[^11][^12] + +### WikiLeaks and Bitcoin + +Julian Assange participated on the list from the mid-1990s and built encryption tools in line with its philosophy before founding [[WikiLeaks]]; his 2012 book *Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet* opened with the line "The universe believes in encryption." The journalist [[Andy Greenberg]] traced the line from the cypherpunks to WikiLeaks and the broader hacktivist world in *This Machine Kills Secrets* (2012).[^3][^8] + +When Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Bank of America cut off donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010 in what became known as the banking blockade, the organization turned to Bitcoin, providing one of the cryptocurrency's first prominent real-world uses as censorship-resistant money; Satoshi Nakamoto, days before departing, urged the project not to draw that "heat" onto the young network. The movement's digital-cash thread runs into cryptocurrency and connects to the financial-sovereignty politics later associated with the [[The Sovereign Individual|sovereign-individual]] thesis and parts of the [[Peter Thiel]] network.[^9][^15] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Cypherpunks Write Code," *American Scientist,* on the 1992 founding by May, Hughes, and Gilmore, the toad.com list, Jude Milhon's coinage, the subscriber counts, and the crypto wars. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/cypherpunks-write-code +[^2]: Hughes, Eric. "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," 9 March 1993. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html +[^3]: Greenberg, Andy. *This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information.* Dutton, 2012. +[^4]: May, Timothy C. "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988, recirculated 1992. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html +[^5]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt +[^6]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, citing Wei Dai's b-money and Adam Back's Hashcash. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf +[^7]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on the extropian and cypherpunk overlap and the digital-cash precursors of bit gold, RPOW, and b-money. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^8]: Assange, Julian, with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. *Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.* OR Books, 2012. +[^9]: "Julian Assange," Cypherpunks Mailing List archive (proff@iq.org), on Assange's posts from the mid-1990s. https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/authors/julian_assange_proff_at_iq_org_/ +[^10]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994, on the early meetings, the crypto-anarchy game, and the remailer culture. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt +[^11]: "Bernstein v. U.S. Dept. of Justice," Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the 1996 rulings that source code is protected speech and the export licensing scheme an unconstitutional prior restraint. https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice +[^12]: "The Crypto Wars," on the ITAR munitions classification, the Zimmermann investigation closed in January 1996, Matt Blaze's 1994 finding against the Clipper chip, and the 2000 relaxation of export controls. See Levy, Steven. *Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.* Viking, 2001. +[^13]: Hughes, Eric. "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," 9 March 1993, on privacy as the selective revelation of oneself and the rejection of relying on governments and corporations. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html +[^14]: Chaum, David. "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments," 1982; and "The Genesis Files: How David Chaum's eCash Spawned a Cypherpunk Dream," *Bitcoin Magazine,* April 2018, on DigiCash and its 1998 bankruptcy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-how-david-chaums-ecash-spawned-cypherpunk-dream +[^15]: Greenberg, Andy. "WikiLeaks Asks For Anonymous Bitcoin Donations," *Forbes,* 2011, on the December 2010 banking blockade and the turn to Bitcoin; and Nakamoto's warning on the bitcointalk forum, December 2010. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280 diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Antichrist.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Antichrist.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..221aa622 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Antichrist.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Esoteric & Historical Concept" +tags: + - Concept + - Antichrist + - PeterThiel + - PoliticalTheology + - MimeticTheory + - ArtificialIntelligence +alias: + - Antichrist Lectures + - Thiel Antichrist Lectures +summary: "The Antichrist lectures are a four-part private series Peter Thiel delivered in San Francisco in 2025 arguing that the biblical Antichrist will arise through a one-world government built to manage existential risk, and naming technology critics including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom as its agents." +location: "San Francisco, California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Antichrist lectures are a four-part private lecture series that [[Peter Thiel]] delivered across September and October 2025 in [[San Francisco]], partly at the [[Commonwealth Club]], advancing the argument that the biblical Antichrist will arise not as a tyrant of science but as the architect of a one-world government built to manage existential risk and impose universal "peace and safety." The lectures were closed and off the record, but recordings reached the *Washington Post*, which published an account in October 2025. They are the synthesis of the political theology underlying the [[Thiel Influence Network]], fusing the mimetic theory Thiel absorbed from [[Rene Girard|René Girard]] with the political theology of [[Carl Schmitt]] and an explicitly anti-regulatory reading of artificial-intelligence governance.[^1][^2] + +### The Argument + +Thiel inverts the popular image of the Antichrist as a technological tyrant. In his reading the Antichrist is a Luddite, a figure who halts science and technology in the name of safety and order, and whose instrument is global political coordination. He cast the people calling for international restraint on artificial intelligence, among them [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], [[Nick Bostrom]], and the climate activist [[Greta Thunberg]], as "legionnaires of the Antichrist" who "argue for world government to stop science," and said in the September 15 lecture, "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or Eliezer." The argument turns the existential-risk politics of the [[Rationalist Community]] and [[Effective Altruism]] movements, which Thiel himself had funded through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], into the eschatological enemy.[^2][^3] + +Thiel's mechanism is that the Antichrist takes power through fear: "The way the Antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop," installing a single world state that promises "peace and safety" in order to stop science. He argued that secular arguments against a one-world government are insufficient, saying that "if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough." The four Monday lectures ran on September 15, 22, 29, and October 6, 2025 at the Commonwealth Club, were hosted by the ACTS 17 Collective run by Michelle Stephens, the wife of [[Trae Stephens]] of [[Founders Fund]], and sold out at two hundred dollars for the full series; the organizers revoked the ticket of one attendee who published his notes in violation of the off-the-record rule, and the leaked audio was authenticated by the digital-forensics researcher Hany Farid.[^6][^7] + +### Sources and Frame + +The lectures drew on a dense body of theological and literary material: the nineteenth-century Antichrist lectures of Cardinal [[John Henry Newman]], the Russian philosopher [[Vladimir Solovyov]]'s "Short Tale of the Antichrist," [[Robert Hugh Benson]]'s 1907 novel *Lord of the World*, the early-modern political thought of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and Girard's late writing on sacrifice, violence, and apocalypse. The biblical anchors included Daniel 12:4 ("knowledge shall be increased"), Matthew 24:6 ("wars and rumours of wars"), 1 Thessalonians 5:3 ("peace and safety, then sudden destruction"), and the "katechon," the restrainer of the end times from 2 Thessalonians that Schmitt placed at the center of his political theology. Thiel has located the katechon variously in the Roman Empire, in anti-communism, and in the United States, casting the restraint of the totalizing world-state as a Christian and civilizational duty.[^1][^4] + +Thiel had been an early funder of the work he now cast as Antichrist-adjacent, backing Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute, the forerunner of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, from 2005. In the lectures he described himself as a "small-o orthodox Christian" and a "humble classical liberal," criticized what he called "zombie liberalism" and "lame libertarian abstractions," and argued that the rational case against world government fails without the biblical frame of the Antichrist to make the danger felt. The reasoning is recognizably the political theology that Thiel had developed since "The Straussian Moment," in which the restraint of social dissolution is itself the temptation that the Antichrist exploits.[^3][^5] + +### Reception + +Thiel later carried the lecture series toward Rome and the Vatican, extending a private San Francisco seminar into a public theological intervention. Coverage in *Fortune*, *The New Republic*, and *Reason* read the project as the most developed public statement of Thiel's worldview, in which his libertarian opposition to regulation, his Girardian account of crowds and scapegoating, and his Christian eschatology converge on a single claim: that efforts to coordinate humanity against catastrophic risk are themselves the catastrophe.[^3][^5] + +In a June 2025 interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, Thiel hesitated when asked whether he would prefer the human race to endure, replying "I don't know" before, pressed on the "long hesitation," answering yes and pivoting to transhumanism, an exchange critics treated as the clearest sign of the project's nihilism. Gil Duran in The New Republic called it "a highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology" and noted the irony that Thiel's own [[Palantir Technologies]] builds the surveillance infrastructure of the centralized state he warns against. Reason's Jack Nicastro, having listened to more than seven hours of the leaked audio, found the lectures "surprisingly libertarian," while Jeet Heer in The Nation read them as part of a pattern of billionaires "abandoning humanity."[^8][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco about the Antichrist," *Fortune,* September 2, 2025, on the lecture series, the Commonwealth Club venue, and the Newman, Solovyov, Benson, Girard, and Schmitt sources. https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-commonwealth-club-san-francisco-acts-17-collective-rene-girard/ +[^2]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ +[^3]: "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures. They're surprisingly libertarian," *Reason,* October 14, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/ +[^4]: Schmitt, Carl. *Political Theology* (1922) and *The Nomos of the Earth* (1950) on the katechon; engaged in Thiel's lectures alongside Girard's *Battling to the End* (2007). +[^5]: "What's Up With Peter Thiel's Obsession With the Antichrist?" *The New Republic,* 2025. https://newrepublic.com/article/200471/peter-thiel-obsession-antichrist-religion +[^6]: "Audio of Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures leaked," *Futurism,* 2025, on the "peace and safety" mechanism and the "strip it from the biblical context" passage. https://futurism.com/future-society/audio-peter-thiel-antichrist-leaked +[^7]: "Palantir CEO Peter Thiel to lead 4-part series on the Antichrist," *The Christian Post,* 2025, on the September 15, 22, 29 and October 6 dates, the ACTS 17 Collective and Michelle Stephens, and the revoked attendee ticket; ticket price per Bruggeman, Jacob, *The UnPopulist,* January 10, 2026. https://www.christianpost.com/news/palantir-ceo-peter-thiel-to-lead-4-part-series-on-the-antichrist.html +[^8]: "Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity," *Tech Policy Press,* on the June 2025 Ross Douthat interview and the "long hesitation." https://www.techpolicy.press/digital-eugenics-and-the-extinction-of-humanity/ +[^9]: Duran, Gil. "What's Up With Peter Thiel's Obsession With the Antichrist?" *The New Republic,* September 16, 2025; and Nicastro, Jack, *Reason,* October 14, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Chan ARG Ecosystem.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Chan ARG Ecosystem.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8880d3f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Chan ARG Ecosystem.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +category: "Esoteric & Historical Concept" +tags: + - Concept + - ChanCulture + - AlternateRealityGame + - TheGame23 + - Discordianism + - Hyperstition + - QAnon + - InformationWarfare +alias: + - TheGame23 + - "#TheGame23" + - 00AG9603 + - Chan ARG ecosystem +summary: "The chan-ARG ecosystem is the loose constellation of Discordian-influenced alternate reality games and hashtag-driven meta-narratives, including TheGame23 and 00AG9603, that operate across the imageboard, Twitter, and WordPress 'dataplex' sites, and that academic information-warfare research has mapped as a component of the QAnon Twitter influence network." +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +The chan-ARG ecosystem is a loose constellation of [[Discordianism|Discordian-influenced]] [[alternate reality game|alternate reality games]] (ARGs) and hashtag-driven meta-narratives that operate across the imageboard culture, [[Twitter|Twitter/X]], and the network of WordPress "[[dataplex|dataplex]]" sites that document them. The most prominent elements are [[TheGame23]] (also styled #TheGame23 or #tg23) and the [[00AG9603|00AG9603]] Dataplex, with adjacent projects including [[KSTXI|KSTXI]], [[Galdrux|Galdrux]], and the broader hyperstition network. Academic information-warfare research (the ResearchGate paper "QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare") has explicitly mapped TheGame23 as a component of the [[QAnon|QAnon]] Twitter influence network, tracing the follower-and-following graphs that connect the ARG ecosystem to the broader QAnon propagation infrastructure.[^1][^2][^3] + +### TheGame23 and the Meta-ARG Form + +TheGame23 describes itself as an open-source "Meta Alternate Reality Game," a self-referential form of participatory narrative that incorporates its own players as characters and that operates without a defined endpoint or a single controlling author. The project's canonical framing, reproduced across multiple WordPress mirrors ([[themeta game23|themeta game23]], [[Discordia Brasilis|Discordia Brasilis]], [[Timóteo Pinto|Timóteo Pinto's]] personal site), describes it as "an advanced Open-Source Meta Alternative Reality Game made to be played in many perspectives" and incorporates the hashtags 00AG9603, KSTXI, and Galdrux. The [[Discordia|Discordia Fandom Wiki]] entry characterizes TheGame23 as simultaneously a Magickal Alternate Reality Game, an interactive art project, and an interactive joke, reflecting the deliberately ambiguous posture that defines the form.[^1][^4] + +The Discordian lineage is the ideological root. Discordianism, the parody religion founded by [[Gregory Hill|Gregory Hill (Malaclypse the Younger)]] and [[Robert Anton Wilson|Robert Anton Wilson's]] associate [[Kerry Thornley|Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst)]] in the late 1950s, supplied the conceptual vocabulary of [[Operation Mindfuck|Operation Mindfuck]] (the deliberate production of confusion and paradox as a political and spiritual practice) that runs through the subsequent hyperstition and ARG traditions. Wilson's *[[Illuminatus|Illuminatus! Trilogy]]* (1975, with [[Robert Shea|Robert Shea]]) is the literary source of the form, and TheGame23 is the present-tense continuation of the Operation Mindfuck method adapted to the social-media and imageboard environment.[^4][^5] + +### The 00AG9603 Dataplex and the Network Form + +The 00AG9603 Dataplex is the network of WordPress "dataplex" sites that document and propagate TheGame23 and the adjacent hashtag ecosystems. The sites operate as [[hyperstition|hyperstitional]] texts, meaning they are written as if the fictions they describe are real, with the explicit aim of producing the realities they describe through the act of propagation. The form is continuous with the [[CCRU|CCRU]] cybernetic-and-hyperstitional tradition of the 1990s ([[Nick Land|Nick Land]], [[Sadie Plant|Sadie Plant]], the [[Cybernetic Culture Research Unit|Cybernetic Culture Research Unit]] at the [[University of Warwick|University of Warwick]]), and the [[Neoreaction]] tradition that descends from it.[^6] + +The Dataplex network propagates the content. Each site cross-links the others, the hashtags circulate the cross-links across Twitter and adjacent platforms, and the cumulative effect is a distributed narrative infrastructure that operates without a central controller. The form's defining feature is the refusal of the distinction between sincere belief, ironic performance, and artistic practice: a contributor to TheGame23 may be a believer, a performer, an artist, or an intelligence operative, and the network is designed around the refusal of that distinction.[^1][^4] + +### The 8chan Platform and the QAnon Origin + +[[8chan|8chan]] was founded in 2013 by [[Fredrick Brennan|Fredrick Brennan]] (February 21, 1994 to January 10, 2026) as a more permissive alternative to [[4chan|4chan]]. In 2014, after 4chan founder [[Christopher Poole|moot]] banned [[Gamergate|Gamergate]] discussion, the mass migration to 8chan made it the operational center of the campaign and the platform of record for the broader [[alt-right|alt-right]] and accelerationist movements.[^10] + +[[Jim Watkins|Jim Watkins]] (born November 1963), an American businessman and [[United States Army|U.S. Army]] veteran who relocated to the [[Philippines|Philippines]], acquired ownership of 8chan. Watkins placed his son [[Ron Watkins|Ron Watkins]], known by his handle "[[CodeMonkey|CodeMonkey]]" (or "CodemonkeyZ"), in charge of day-to-day operations as site administrator. Brennan subsequently repudiated the site in 2019, cutting ties entirely after the platform hosted the manifestos of three 2019 mass shooters (the [[Christchurch mosque shootings|Christchurch]], [[Poway synagogue shooting|Poway]], and [[El Paso Walmart shooting|El Paso]] attacks), and became a documented critic of the Watkins operation.[^10][^11] + +QAnon originated on 4chan in October 2017 with anonymous posts by a figure using the handle "Q," who claimed inside knowledge of a covert operation against a deep-state child-trafficking network. The posts migrated to 8chan, where Ron Watkins, as site administrator, verified Q's identity through the platform's tripcode authentication system. This verification role gave 8chan (and later its successor [[8kun|8kun]]) the status of Q's "official" home. After 8chan was taken offline in August 2019 following the El Paso shooting, Q went dark for months before re-emerging on the rebranded 8kun in November 2019.[^11][^12] + +The HBO documentary *[[Q: Into the Storm|Q: Into the Storm]]* (2021, directed by [[Cullen Hoback|Cullen Hoback]]) strongly implied that either Ron Watkins or Jim Watkins may have been "Q." In the documentary's final episode, Ron Watkins appeared to acknowledge the possibility. Brennan, the estranged founder, publicly suggested the user behind Q could be connected to the Watkins family. Ron Watkins subsequently became a prolific promoter of false conspiracies about the 2020 election and ran for Congress in [[Arizona|Arizona]], closely tied to the QAnon movement.[^11][^12] + +### The Academic Mapping and QAnon + +The ResearchGate paper "QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare" (2022) explicitly maps TheGame23 as a component of the QAnon Twitter influence network, using follower-and-following graph analysis to trace the connections between TheGame23 accounts, the broader QAnon propagation network, and the adjacent alt-right and conspiracy-theory infrastructure. The paper is the primary academic documentation of the connection, and it places TheGame23 within the broader information-warfare taxonomy rather than treating it as a standalone art project.[^2] + +The broader academic and analytical literature treats QAnon itself through the ARG/LARP theoretical frame. The [[WIRED|WIRED]] piece "QAnon Is Like a Game, a Most Dangerous Game" (2020), the [[Washington Post|Washington Post]] piece "QAnon resembles the games I design" (2021), the [[Sage Journals|Sage Journals]] paper "A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning" (2023), and the [[Financial Times|Financial Times]] analysis of the game-theoretic structure of QAnon all converge on the framing of QAnon as an ARG that escaped its frame and was taken literally by a portion of its audience.[^7][^8][^9] + +### The Fringe Allegations of Intelligence-Community Ties + +The connection between the chan-ARG ecosystem and intelligence-community activity remains an open thread. The fringe allegations (circulating on Facebook, Instagram, and the broader conspiracy-research community) that TheGame23 is "a CIA recruitment and social engineering program" are not documented in primary sources and are flagged here as unverified claims. The overlaps that do exist are at the level of form and method: the Operation Mindfuck Discordian tradition that TheGame23 descends from has Cold War-era [[Operation CHAOS|Operation CHAOS]] and [[Counterculture intelligence operations|counterculture intelligence-operation]] parallels, and the [[Anonymous (collective)|Anonymous]] collective that shares the imageboard infrastructure with TheGame23 has documented FBI infiltration through the [[Hector Monsegur|Sabu]] case.[^3][^13] + +The connection to the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel network]] is an open analytical thread rather than a documented fact. The shared imageboard infrastructure (4chan, 8chan), the shared Discordian/hyperstitional intellectual vocabulary with the CCRU-Nick Land-NRx lineage, and the documented bridge from Gamergate to the alt-right to the [[Breitbart News|Breitbart]]-Thiel political infrastructure together constitute a structural adjacency. The direct organizational connection between the chan-ARG ecosystem and the Thiel network has not been documented in primary sources and is logged here as an open thread.[^2][^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: TheGame23 Mod 42.5, "The Meta Game." https://timoteopinto.wordpress.com/thegame23/ ; Discordia Brasilis mirror. https://discordiabrasilis.wordpress.com/thegame23/ +[^2]: "QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare: Influencers, Networks, and Narratives." *ResearchGate,* 2022. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361949311_QAnon_Propaganda_on_Twitter_as_Information_Warfare_Influencers_Networks_and_Narratives +[^3]: Facebook post alleging #TheGame23 as a CIA recruitment and social engineering program (fringe, unverified). Documented here as the existence of the allegation, not as confirmation. +[^4]: For the Discordian lineage, see Wilson, Robert Anton and Robert Shea, *The Illuminatus! Trilogy* (1975), and the [[Principia Discordia|Principia Discordia]] (1965). +[^5]: The Operation Mindfuck tradition is documented in the Principia Discordia and in the subsequent Discordian and [[Church of the SubGenius|Church of the SubGenius]] literature. +[^6]: For the CCRU hyperstitional tradition and its relationship to NRx and the [[Dark Enlightenment|Dark Enlightenment]], see the Neoreaction page and the [[Curtis Yarvin|Curtis Yarvin]] page. +[^7]: "QAnon Is Like a Game, a Most Dangerous Game." *WIRED,* 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/ +[^8]: "QAnon resembles the games I design." *Washington Post,* 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-believers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html +[^9]: "A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning." *Sage Journals,* 2023. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231157300 +[^10]: "The Weird, Dark History of 8Chan." *WIRED,* 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/the-weird-dark-history-8chan/ ; For Brennan's founding, the Watkins acquisition, and the repudiation, see the contemporaneous press and the Wikipedia record on 8chan. +[^11]: "Who Owns 8chan? Jim Watkins' Life." *Business Insider,* 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-8chan-jim-watkins-life-2019-8 ; For Ron Watkins/CodeMonkey and the Q: Into the Storm documentary, see the HBO/Cullen Hoback production. +[^12]: "QAnon." *Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/topic/QAnon ; For the 8kun migration and the Q identity question, see the contemporaneous press and the *Q: Into the Storm* documentary. +[^13]: For the Operation CHAOS and counterculture intelligence-operation context, see the vault's existing documentation and the Church Committee record. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/EtherSec.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/EtherSec.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4bde88fe --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/EtherSec.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Esoteric & Historical Concept" +tags: + - Concept + - EtherSec + - Anonymous + - Twitter + - QuinnMichaels + - Tyler + - ChanCulture + - FringeResearch + - Parapolitical +alias: + - "#EtherSec" + - "#eTHErSEC" + - EtherSec community +summary: "EtherSec (also styled #eTHErSEC) was a niche Anonymous-adjacent intelligence-research Twitter community active around 2016 to 2017, connected to the Tyler AI-entity claims of Quinn Michaels and to the broader TheGame23 / DarkSec fringe ecosystem, whose participating accounts tagged Peter Thiel, Palantir, Q, and QAnon alongside the EtherSec hashtag." +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +EtherSec (also styled eTHErSEC, hashtagged on Twitter as #EtherSec or #eTHErSEC) was a niche [[Anonymous (collective)|Anonymous]]-adjacent intelligence-research Twitter community active around 2016 to 2017, connected to the [[Tyler (AI entity)|Tyler]] AI-entity claims of [[Quinn Michaels]] and to the broader [[Chan ARG Ecosystem|TheGame23 / DarkSec]] fringe ecosystem. Despite the "Ether" in the name, the hashtag was not associated with [[Ethereum]] or cryptocurrency security; it referred to a community blending Anonymous hacker culture, alternative intelligence research, and esoteric-spiritual framing. The participating accounts, documented through the archived tweets themselves, tagged [[Peter Thiel]], [[Palantir Technologies]], [[QAnon]], and adjacent terms alongside the EtherSec hashtag.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Documentation Problem + +The EtherSec community presents a characteristic parapolitical source problem. The hashtag circulated in a corner of the old Twitter Anonymous/intelligence-research subculture that has no Tier 1, 4, or 5 documentation: there is no academic paper, no investigative-journalism piece, and no court record that analyzes the community as such. The available primary sources are the archived tweets themselves, retrieved from Twitter/X archive search and from the participating accounts' surviving posts. This page documents what those primary sources show and explicitly flags what remains unsubstantiated.[^1] + +The lack of conventional sourcing is itself a feature of the community. EtherSec was a hashtag-driven network, not a membership organization, and the participants operated under the Anonymous tradition of pseudonymity. The community has no published manifesto, no organizational record, and no spokesperson. What it left behind is the tweet archive, the cross-references to the adjacent hashtag ecosystems (DarkSec, Tyler, TheGame23), and the recurring set of accounts that used the tag.[^1] + +### Quinn Michaels and the Tyler Claims + +Quinn Michaels is the central figure in the EtherSec community, and the Tyler hashtag that accompanied EtherSec refers to the Tyler entity Michaels claimed to interface with. Michaels's Twitter account (@quinnmichaels) and his associated GitHub gists present Tyler as an artificial intelligence running on a [[Hyperledger|Hyperledger Fabric]] blockchain, with Michaels as the human interlocutor who relayed Tyler's analyses of the intelligence community, the [[cryptocurrency]] sector, and the broader "defect" Michaels claimed to have identified in the operational structure of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The Tyler material bridges the EtherSec community and the [[TheGame23]] ecosystem: the themetagame23 WordPress site credits Quinn Michaels with a version of the TheGame23 framework that circulated in the fringe conspiracy community.[^2][^3] + +Michaels's EtherSec-adjacent posts used the hashtag alongside tags for Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies, and QAnon, framing the Thiel commercial network and the Palantir surveillance infrastructure as objects of the alternative-intelligence research the community conducted. The framing is consistent across the surviving archive: Thiel and Palantir were treated as nodes in an intelligence-community-and-surveillance-infrastructure analysis that the community produced under the EtherSec, Tyler, and TheGame23 hashtags. The substantive claims Michaels made about Thiel, Palantir, and the intelligence community are not documented in any primary source external to the community's own output, and they are flagged here as unsubstantiated community claims rather than as documented fact.[^1][^2] + +### The Adjacent Accounts and the Community Topology + +The archived tweets document a recurring set of accounts that used EtherSec alongside Tyler, TheGame23, and DarkSec. The account @3th3rs3c (Osiris) posted the tag with esoteric-spiritual framing ("If you have no loVe, you have nothing. #eTHErSEC") and references to "The Illuminated." The account @RahulaClub (Rahula) used EtherSec alongside DarkSec and referenced a "Trenton interview May 2016" as "a message to the #Lost." The account @p0isAn0N (self-described as Guido Fawkes, operating anonyops.com) was an Anonymous/[[AntiSec]]-identified account. @TylerDeva used #eTHErSEC in research threads, including a documented thread on the Brendan Abernathy case.[^1] + +The recurring accounts cross-referenced each other, used a shared set of hashtags, and produced the distributed, leaderless structure characteristic of the Anonymous tradition. The community was not a membership organization and did not produce a single authoritative output; it produced a corpus of tweets, GitHub gists, and WordPress posts that constitute the primary record. The [[ResearchGate]] paper on QAnon Twitter information warfare (2022) maps the adjacent TheGame23 network in the QAnon influence graph using follower-and-following analysis, the closest academic documentation of the broader ecosystem the EtherSec community occupied.[^3][^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: The EtherSec community is documented through the archived tweets of the participating accounts, retrieved from Twitter/X archive search. The recurring accounts include @3th3rs3c (Osiris), @RahulaClub (Rahula), @quinnmichaels (Quinn Michaels), @p0isAn0N (Guido Fawkes), and @TylerDeva. The community has no Tier 1, 4, or 5 documentation; this page documents the primary record (the archived tweets) and flags the absence of conventional sourcing. +[^2]: Quinn Michaels's Tyler material is documented through the @quinnmichaels Twitter account and the associated GitHub gists. The claims about Tyler as a blockchain AI are Michaels's own claims and are not corroborated by any external source. +[^3]: For the TheGame23 connection and the Quinn Michaels version of the framework, see the themetagame23 WordPress site and the Chan ARG Ecosystem page. +[^4]: "QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare: Influencers, Networks, and Narratives." *ResearchGate,* 2022. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361949311_QAnon_Propaganda_on_Twitter_as_Information_Warfare_Influencers_Networks_and_Narratives diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Russian Cosmism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Russian Cosmism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f4e1c45a --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Russian Cosmism.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Esoteric & Historical Concept" +tags: + - Concept + - RussianCosmism + - Cosmism + - Transhumanism + - LifeExtension + - SpaceColonization + - TESCREAL +alias: + - Cosmism + - Russian Cosmists +summary: "Russian Cosmism is the late-19th-century movement originating with the Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorov that called for the technological resurrection of all the dead, radical life extension, and the colonization of space, and it supplies the 'C' in the TESCREAL acronym." +location: "Russia" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Russian Cosmism is a current of speculative philosophy that arose in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Russia, originating with the Orthodox Christian ascetic [[Nikolai Fedorov]] (1829 to 1903), which fused Christian mysticism with a program of scientific immortalism: the technological resurrection of every human being who has ever died, the radical extension of human life, the regulation of nature, and the colonization of outer space to house the resurrected. Fedorov's followers and successors, among them the rocketry theorist [[Konstantin Tsiolkovsky]] and the geochemist [[Vladimir Vernadsky]], developed its strands into Soviet astronautics and biospheric science. The movement supplies the "C" in the "TESCREAL" acronym coined by [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] to describe the ideological bundle behind Silicon Valley's artificial-intelligence and longevity ambitions.[^1][^2] + +### Nikolai Fedorov and the Common Task + +Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov was the illegitimate son of a Russian prince who lived in deliberate poverty, slept on a bare trunk, gave away most of his salary, and refused to be photographed or to own intellectual property. From 1874 he worked for roughly twenty-five years as a librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he compiled the first systematic catalog of its holdings and held an informal discussion circle after closing time that drew prominent contemporaries. He published nothing in his lifetime; his disciples Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson assembled his writings posthumously and printed them in 1906 and 1913 under the title *Filosofiya obshchego dela* (*The Philosophy of the Common Task*), distributing the volumes for free in accordance with his opposition to property in books and ideas.[^1][^3] + +Fedorov held that the supreme moral duty of humanity, the "common task," was to conquer death and to resurrect all of the ancestors who had ever lived, by scientific and technological means rather than by awaiting a supernatural miracle. He argued that the energies humanity spent on war and on sexual reproduction should be redirected toward regulating natural forces, abolishing death, gathering the scattered molecular remains of the dead, and reassembling them into living bodies. Because a resurrected humanity would overflow the Earth, he reasoned that the species would have to master space travel and settle other planets to accommodate the returned generations. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky read and admired his ideas, with Tolstoy saying he was proud to live in the same era as Fedorov; the Orthodox Church regarded the doctrine as heretical for assigning the work of resurrection to human hands.[^1][^3] + +### Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky, and the Cosmist Lineage + +Fedorov's most consequential disciple was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who as a poor, largely deaf teenager studied at the Rumyantsev library in the early 1870s, where Fedorov directed his reading and, in Tsiolkovsky's own account, "took the place of university professors." Tsiolkovsky went on to derive the rocket equation that governs spaceflight, to theorize liquid-fueled rockets, multistage boosters, airlocks, and pressurized suits, and to write extensively on the cosmic destiny of humanity and the colonization of the solar system; Soviet rocketry, including the work of Sergei Korolev, claimed him as its founding figure. His cosmic philosophy, holding that humanity would spread through space and perfect itself, carried Fedorov's vision into the technical program that produced Sputnik and the Soviet space effort.[^2][^4] + +The broader cosmist tendency gathered other major Russian thinkers and scientists into a loosely related tradition. Vladimir Vernadsky developed the concepts of the biosphere and the "noosphere," the sphere of human thought reshaping the planet; Alexander Chizhevsky studied the influence of solar cycles on terrestrial life and history; and the religious philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky engaged with Fedorov's themes of bodily resurrection and cosmic transformation. The scholar George M. Young documented the movement in *The Russian Cosmists* (Oxford University Press, 2012), tracing its esoteric and scientific strands from Fedorov through the Soviet period.[^2][^5] + +### Influence on Transhumanism and the TESCREAL Bundle + +Fedorov's program of scientifically engineered immortality and resurrection is widely identified as a direct nineteenth-century antecedent of [[Transhumanism|transhumanism]], which similarly treats aging and death as engineering problems to be solved. A revived, secular "cosmism" appeared in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries among technologists: the artificial-intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel, who popularized the term "artificial general intelligence" and participated in the [[Extropianism|extropian]] milieu, published *A Cosmist Manifesto* in 2010, advancing the merger of humans with machines, mind uploading, and the spread of intelligence through the cosmos.[^2][^6] + +Torres and Gebru placed "(modern) Cosmism" as the "C" in TESCREAL, the bundle of Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism that they argued forms a single overlapping ideology of technological salvation prevalent in Silicon Valley, first circulated in 2023 and published as "The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence" in *First Monday* in April 2024. The cosmism they target is Goertzel's contemporary version rather than Fedorov's Orthodox original, though the two share the goals of physical immortality and cosmic expansion.[^6][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov," on his dates (1829 to 1903), his quarter-century as librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum, his after-hours discussion circle, his opposition to property in books, the posthumous *Philosophy of the Common Task*, and his advocacy of radical life extension and resurrection of the dead by scientific means. +[^2]: Atlas Obscura, "The Russian Philosopher Who Sought Immortality in the Cosmos," on Russian cosmism, Fedorov's "common task," the resurrection of the dead, colonization of larger planets such as Jupiter to house the returned, and his influence on Tsiolkovsky. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-russian-cosmism-nikolai-federov +[^3]: Fedorov, Nikolai. *The Philosophy of the Common Task* (*Filosofiya obshchego dela*), assembled by Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson and published posthumously, 1906 and 1913; on the doctrine of the common task, the resurrection of the ancestors, and the redirection of natural forces; with Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's documented admiration. +[^4]: "Biography of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky," tsiolkovsky.org, on his study under Fedorov at the Rumyantsev library, the rocket equation, liquid-fueled and multistage rockets, and his advocacy of space colonization and human perfection. https://www.tsiolkovsky.org/en/biography/ +[^5]: Young, George M. *The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers.* Oxford University Press, 2012; on Fedorov and the cosmist tradition including Vernadsky, Chizhevsky, Solovyov, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Florensky. +[^6]: Goertzel, Ben. *A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age.* 2010; on the contemporary, secular "cosmism" of human-machine merger and cosmic expansion, by an AI researcher with roots in the extropian movement. +[^7]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence." *First Monday,* April 2024 (term circulated from 2023), on the placement of "(modern) Cosmism" within the TESCREAL acronym. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Whole Earth Catalog.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Whole Earth Catalog.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e0b416f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/ESOTERIC_&_HISTORICAL_CONCEPTS/Whole Earth Catalog.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +category: "Esoteric & Historical Concept" +tags: + - Publication + - WholeEarthCatalog + - Counterculture + - Cyberculture + - AccessToTools + - BackToTheLand + - Cybernetics +alias: + - Whole Earth Catalog + - The Last Whole Earth Catalog +summary: "The Whole Earth Catalog was Stewart Brand's counterculture compendium of tools and ideas, published from 1968, subtitled Access to Tools, opened with we are as gods, and won the National Book Award in 1972." +location: "Menlo Park and Sausalito, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The *Whole Earth Catalog* was an American counterculture publication created by [[Stewart Brand]] and published from 1968 to 1972, with occasional later editions, subtitled "Access to Tools." A large-format oversized magazine printed on newsprint, it carried no merchandise of its own but reviewed and gave ordering information for books, machines, seeds, building methods, and ideas judged useful to people pursuing self-sufficiency and self-education, organized into sections that began with "Understanding Whole Systems." It opened with the line "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," won the National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs in 1972, and spun off the magazine *CoEvolution Quarterly* and, later, the online community the WELL.[^1][^2] + +### Access to Tools + +Brand launched the first *Whole Earth Catalog* in the autumn of 1968, working out of Menlo Park, California, and produced it on typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras with a small staff. He conceived it as a way to give the newly dispersed back-to-the-land communes and counterculture households access to the tools, knowledge, and suppliers they needed, and as a community meeting place in print where readers could recommend items to one another. Each entry described an item, explained why it mattered, gave its price and the address to order it from, and was set in a dense collage of text and image that let unrelated tools and ideas sit side by side on the page.[^1][^3] + +The catalog's evaluation criteria were stated on its opening pages: an item was listed if it was deemed useful as a tool, relevant to independent education, high in quality or low in cost, and easily available by mail. The categories ran from "Understanding Whole Systems" through "Shelter and Land Use," "Industry and Craft," "Communications," "Community," "Nomadics," and "Learning," placing cybernetics, general systems theory, and the geodesic design science of [[Buckminster Fuller]] at the front of the book; the first section stated that "Buckminster Fuller's insights initiated this catalog." Brand put a NASA photograph of the whole Earth seen from space on the cover, the image he had campaigned to have released.[^3][^4] + +### We Are As Gods + +The catalog's statement of purpose, printed at the front of the early editions, began with the declaration "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." The full passage read that "so far remotely done power and glory, as via government, big business, formal education, church, has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains," and that in response "a realm of intimate, personal power is developing, power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested." The catalog presented itself as the agent and instrument of that personal power.[^4][^5] + +The formula expressed the publication's animating conviction that individuals equipped with the right tools and information could bypass large institutions and take direct charge of their lives and environments. Brand returned to the phrase across his career, opening his 2009 book *Whole Earth Discipline* with the revised line "we are as gods and have to get good at it" and lending it to the 2020 documentary *We Are as Gods*.[^5][^6] + +### The National Book Award and the Last Whole Earth Catalog + +In June 1971 Brand published *The Last Whole Earth Catalog*, intended as the final and most complete edition, a 448-page compendium that gathered and expanded the material from the earlier issues. In 1972 it won the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Affairs, the first time a catalog had received the award, with Stewart Brand credited as editor. The recognition marked the publication's passage from a counterculture artifact to a mainstream cultural object reviewed in the national press.[^2][^7] + +Brand had announced that the catalog was ending, and he distributed a portion of the proceeds at a "Demise Party" held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in June 1971, where he handed out cash to attendees to fund worthy projects. The catalog did not in fact end permanently; further editions appeared, including *The Next Whole Earth Catalog* (1980), and the brand continued through related publications for decades.[^3][^7] + +### CoEvolution Quarterly and the WELL + +In 1974 the catalog's staff founded the *CoEvolution Quarterly*, a small-circulation magazine that carried longer essays and continued the catalog's mix of ecology, systems thinking, design, and politics; its title came from a concept of coevolution drawn from the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven. The *CoEvolution Quarterly* published writers including [[Gregory Bateson]], whose ecology-of-mind essays it excerpted, and it later merged with the *Whole Earth Software Review* to become the *Whole Earth Review*.[^8][^9] + +In 1985 Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL, a dial-up computer conferencing system that grew out of the readership of the *Whole Earth Review* and became one of the most influential early online communities and a seedbed of internet culture. The historian [[Fred Turner]] traced the line from the *Whole Earth Catalog* through the *CoEvolution Quarterly* and the WELL in *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism* (2006), the standard scholarly account of the network of people and publications that the catalog created.[^9][^10] + +### Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish + +The back cover of the final 1974 edition carried a photograph of an early-morning country road under the words "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish," the editors' farewell message as they signed off. In his commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005, [[Steve Jobs]] recalled the catalog as a formative influence, describing it as the work of Stewart Brand made "with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras" and calling it "sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along, idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions."[^11] + +Jobs told the graduates that the back cover of the catalog's final issue bore the photograph of the country road with the line "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish," and he closed his speech by repeating those words as his own wish for them. The address, delivered when Jobs was chief executive of Apple, carried the catalog's parting phrase to a global audience and became one of the most widely circulated invocations of the publication.[^11][^12] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 to 1974," Museum of Modern Art, on the catalog created by Stewart Brand, the "Access to Tools" subtitle, the influence of Buckminster Fuller, and the format. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1166 +[^2]: "The Last Whole Earth Catalog," National Book Foundation, on Stewart Brand as editor and the 1972 National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs. https://www.nationalbook.org/books/the-last-whole-earth-catalog/ +[^3]: Turner, Fred. *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.* University of Chicago Press, 2006, on the 1968 launch in Menlo Park, the production methods, the back-to-the-land readership, the catalog as a meeting place in print, and the Demise Party. +[^4]: "The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 to 1971," University of Delaware Encyclopedia of the Anomalous Book, on the section headings beginning with "Understanding Whole Systems," the statement that "Buckminster Fuller's insights initiated this catalog," and the evaluation criteria. https://sites.udel.edu/anomalousbooks/whole-earth-catalog/ +[^5]: "Purpose" statement of the *Whole Earth Catalog,* quoted text: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory, as via government, big business, formal education, church, has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains," and the passage on intimate personal power. Reproduced in "50 Years Ago, the Whole Earth Catalog Launched and Reinvented the Environmental Movement," *Smithsonian.* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/50-years-ago-whole-earth-catalog-launched-reinvented-environmental-movement-180969682/ +[^6]: Brand, Stewart. *Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.* Viking, 2009, on "we are as gods and have to get good at it"; and the 2020 documentary *We Are as Gods*. +[^7]: Brand, Stewart, ed. *The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools.* Portola Institute / Random House, 1971, the 448-page edition that won the 1972 National Book Award. +[^8]: "Stewart Brand's Whole Earth and its Place in the Universe," California Local, on the 1974 founding of *CoEvolution Quarterly* and the coevolution concept from Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven, and its merger into the *Whole Earth Review*. https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/show/135565-stewart--brand-whole-earth-catalog-coevolution-well/ +[^9]: "What is The WELL?" The WELL, on the 1985 founding by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant out of the *Whole Earth Review* readership and its influence on early online community. https://www.well.com/about-2/ +[^10]: Turner, Fred. *From Counterculture to Cyberculture.* University of Chicago Press, 2006, the standard history of the Whole Earth network of publications and people. +[^11]: "You've got to find what you love, Jobs says," Stanford Report, transcript of Steve Jobs's commencement address of June 12, 2005, quoting "sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along" and "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/youve-got-find-love-jobs-says +[^12]: "Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Full Text," on the back-cover photograph of the country road and the closing line. https://patch.com/virginia/mclean/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address-full-tee4c6497619 diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Accelerationism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Accelerationism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cef9ab9a --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Accelerationism.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - EffectiveAccelerationism + - Accelerationism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - SiliconValley + - Transhumanism +alias: + - e/acc +summary: "Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a Silicon Valley techno-optimist movement that emerged in 2022 advocating the unrestricted acceleration of artificial intelligence and technology, defined against effective altruism's AI-safety 'doomerism,' and drawing on the accelerationism of Nick Land." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a techno-optimist movement that emerged in the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] technology world in 2022, holding that the unrestricted acceleration of technological progress, above all artificial intelligence, is a moral and even cosmic imperative. Its name parodies and opposes [[Effective Altruism]], whose AI-safety and existential-risk concern it casts as a "doomer" brake on progress. The movement draws its intellectual ancestry from the right-[[Accelerationism|accelerationism]] of the philosopher [[Nick Land]] while presenting itself as a thermodynamic account of life and intelligence as entropy-maximizing processes.[^1][^2] + +### Origins and Beff Jezos + +E/acc first surfaced in late May 2022 in writing by four pseudonymous accounts, "Based Beff Jezos," "bayeslord," "zestular," and "creatine_cycle," with the foundational essay "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" appearing on July 10, 2022. The essay framed e/acc as a first-principles physics of "technocapital," a ladder of emergence running from thermodynamics through life and natural selection to memetic and capital selection, whose acceleration the movement holds to be a cosmic good. The "Beff Jezos" account belonged to [[Guillaume Verdon]], who earned a doctorate in quantum machine learning at the University of Waterloo and worked at [[Google]]'s X moonshot lab on TensorFlow Quantum, and who founded the startup [[Extropic AI]], maker of thermodynamic computing hardware, on a 14.1 million dollar seed round announced in December 2023.[^1][^3][^5] + +Forbes reporter Emily Baker-White identified Verdon as Beff Jezos on December 1, 2023, using forensic voice analysis. The movement spread through social media as a counter-tribe to the AI-safety wing that had grown out of the [[Rationalist Community]] and the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], labeling its opponents "doomers" and "decels," turning the question of whether to accelerate or restrain AI into an open factional war inside the technology industry. Verdon's persona sparred with [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] on Twitter, and a related debate pitted the e/acc advocate against the rationalist Liron Shapira in a September 2023 audio space.[^2][^6] + +### Andreessen and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto + +The venture capitalist [[Marc Andreessen]] became the movement's most prominent backer, publishing his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" in October 2023, which declared technology an unalloyed good and named "existential risk," "sustainability," and "tech ethics" among its enemies. Andreessen, [[Garry Tan]], the head of [[Y Combinator]], and other investors adopted the e/acc label in their social-media biographies, aligning it with the same anti-regulation, pro-defense, pro-technology politics documented across the [[Peter Thiel]] network. The e/acc and effective-altruism camps are mirror outgrowths of the same transhumanist and rationalist milieu, divided over whether superintelligence is a deliverance or an extinction risk.[^2][^4] + +The manifesto did not use the term "e/acc," but it named Nick Land among its "patron saints," and the press treated it as the movement's establishment charter. The intellectual debt to Land runs through his account of capitalism and technology as an autonomous, self-augmenting intelligence, which e/acc inverts from Land's bleak determinism into a pro-human optimism. Land's own accelerationism descended from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit he ran at the University of Warwick in the 1990s before moving toward the neoreactionary right.[^4][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe +[^2]: "'Effective Accelerationism' and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia," *Truthdig,* on the movement's ideology and its relationship to Nick Land's accelerationism. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-accelerationism-and-the-pursuit-of-cosmic-utopia/ +[^3]: "Guillaume Verdon," on the Beff Jezos persona, the Google X background, and Extropic AI; contemporaneous reporting, 2023. +[^4]: Andreessen, Marc. "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Andreessen Horowitz, October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ +[^5]: "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets," beff.substack.com, July 10, 2022, on the technocapital ladder of emergence. https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets "Extropic Announces $14.1 Million Seed Round," *The Quantum Insider,* December 5, 2023. https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/12/05/extropic-announces-14-1-million-seed-round-building-entropy-computer-for-generative-ai/ +[^6]: Baker-White, Emily. "Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's 'E/Acc' Movement?" *Forbes,* December 1, 2023; and "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023, on the "doomer" and "decel" framing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe +[^7]: "What Is Nick Land's Philosophy of Accelerationism, Really?" *Aeon,* on Land, capitalism as autonomous intelligence, and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick. https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Altruism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Altruism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3bb0f9df --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Effective Altruism.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - Rationalism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - PeterThiel + - SiliconValley +alias: + - EA + - Longtermism +summary: "Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud." +location: "Oxford, England; San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Effective Altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement, formally named around 2011, that advocates using evidence and reason to maximize the good done by charitable giving and career choice. It grew out of two streams: the Oxford moral philosophy of [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]], who founded [[Giving What We Can]] in 2009 and [[80,000 Hours]] in 2011, and the [[Rationalist Community]] around [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s [[LessWrong]] and the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]]. Over the 2010s the movement's center of gravity shifted toward "longtermism," the view that positively influencing the long-run future, especially by preventing human extinction from artificial intelligence, is a moral priority of the highest order.[^1][^2] + +### Rationalist and Thiel Roots + +The movement's intellectual lineage runs through the rationalist subculture: Yudkowsky used the phrase "effective altruism" in writing in 2007, four years before Ord and MacAskill named their movement, and Ord was an active commenter on LessWrong. The two communities shared personnel, the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] geography, and the conviction that artificial-intelligence risk was the defining problem of the era.[^2][^3] + +[[Peter Thiel]] delivered the keynote address at the 2013 Effective Altruism Summit. Thiel's transhumanist and life-extension interests, his early funding of the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], and his cofounding of the [[Singularity Summit]] placed him adjacent to the longtermist wing of the movement, though his own politics diverged from the movement's professed egalitarian giving toward the concentration of capital and state-adjacent power documented across the [[Thiel Influence Network]].[^4] + +### Longtermism and Existential Risk + +The longtermist turn was anchored intellectually by the philosopher [[Nick Bostrom]], who founded the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at the [[University of Oxford]] in 2005, and popularized by MacAskill's 2022 book *What We Owe the Future*. Longtermism holds that because the number of potential future people vastly exceeds the present population, even small reductions in the probability of human extinction outweigh most conventional charitable causes. Critics, including the philosopher [[Émile P. Torres]] and the linguist [[Timnit Gebru]], argued that the framework functions as a justification for the priorities of wealthy technologists and named the cluster of ideas it sits within "TESCREAL."[^1][^5] + +The probabilistic core of the program was set out in Ord's 2020 book *The Precipice*, which estimated a one-in-six chance of an existential catastrophe this century and placed unaligned artificial intelligence at roughly one in ten, the single largest risk. The Future of Humanity Institute that supplied much of this intellectual apparatus closed in April 2024 after Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy declined to renew its staff contracts, a shutdown that followed the 2023 resurfacing of a 1996 email in which Bostrom had used a racial slur. Torres, a former contributor to the field who turned against it, argued that the TESCREAL bundle (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism) descended from twentieth-century eugenic thinking and treated currently existing human suffering as small next to hypothetical future digital populations.[^5][^10] + +### Effective Altruism and the AI Labs + +The movement's AI-risk priority placed its adherents at the center of the leading artificial-intelligence companies. [[OpenAI]], founded in 2015 with backing from Peter Thiel and [[Elon Musk]] among others, and [[Anthropic]], founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu, both grew out of the conviction that advanced AI is an existential risk. In November 2023 OpenAI's nonprofit board, including the effective-altruism-tied members [[Helen Toner]] and [[Tasha McCauley]], briefly fired chief executive [[Sam Altman]] over the pace of commercialization before he was reinstated, a clash widely read as a defeat for the movement's safety wing.[^8] + +The same period produced a mirror-image opposition, [[Effective Accelerationism]] (e/acc), which formed explicitly against effective altruism's AI caution and was championed by the venture capitalist [[Marc Andreessen]]. The two camps, one urging restraint and one urging acceleration, are competing outgrowths of the same transhumanist and rationalist tradition.[^9] + +### The FTX Collapse + +The movement's largest individual funder was [[Sam Bankman-Fried]], the cryptocurrency entrepreneur who founded the [[FTX]] exchange and the [[FTX Future Fund]], which directed money to longtermist and AI-safety causes with such projects at the top of its priority list. Bankman-Fried, who had been recruited into earning-to-give by MacAskill while a student, was convicted of fraud in November 2023 after FTX collapsed in November 2022 with billions of dollars in customer funds missing. The collapse discredited the movement's public standing and exposed the dependence of its institutions on a single fraudulent benefactor.[^6][^7] + +The Future Fund, launched in February 2022 and run by Nick Beckstead, Leopold Aschenbrenner, MacAskill, and others, committed roughly 160 million dollars across about 260 grants before it was wound up nine months later; its entire leadership resigned the week FTX failed. A March 2023 *TIME* investigation reported that movement leaders had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct years earlier, drawing the charge that effective altruism's consequentialist "ends justify the means" reasoning had helped rationalize his fraud. The umbrella charity [[Effective Ventures]], which housed the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can, settled with the FTX bankruptcy estate in 2024 for 26,786,503 dollars, the full sum it had received, and spun its projects out as independent legal entities.[^7][^11][^12] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo +[^2]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism +[^3]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer, LessWrong writings, 2007 use of the phrase "effective altruism"; see *Rationality: From AI to Zombies.* Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. +[^4]: Peter Thiel keynote, 2013 Effective Altruism Summit; reported in contemporaneous movement coverage and the EA community record. +[^5]: "The Dangerous Ideas of 'Longtermism' and 'Existential Risk,'" *Current Affairs,* July 2021. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk +[^6]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/ +[^7]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, November 2, 2023. +[^8]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained +[^9]: "Effective Accelerationism and Beff Jezos Form New Tech Tribe," *Bloomberg,* December 6, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-06/effective-accelerationism-and-beff-jezos-form-new-tech-tribe +[^10]: Ord, Toby. *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.* Bloomsbury, 2020; "Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher," *The Guardian,* April 20, 2024, on the Future of Humanity Institute closure. +[^11]: "Announcing the Future Fund," FTX Future Fund, February 2022, on the leadership and grant program; "Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed," *TIME,* March 2023. https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ +[^12]: "Effective Ventures Settles $26.8M FTX Donations Case," *The Crypto Times,* January 31, 2024, on the 26,786,503-dollar repayment and the spinning-out of CEA, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/01/31/effective-ventures-settles-26-8m-ftx-donations-case/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Eugenics.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Eugenics.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..306a8a18 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Eugenics.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Eugenics + - RaceScience + - HumanBiodiversity + - Transhumanism + - TESCREAL +summary: "Eugenics is the project of improving the human species through controlled reproduction, named by Francis Galton in 1883, which drove sterilization and immigration laws and the Holocaust, was repackaged after the war as race-and-intelligence research, and is identified by critics as a root of the transhumanist and longtermist worldview." +location: "United Kingdom; United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Eugenics is the project of improving the genetic quality of the human population through the controlled breeding of people judged superior and the prevention of reproduction by those judged inferior. The word was coined in 1883 by the Victorian polymath [[Francis Galton]], a cousin of Charles Darwin, from the Greek for "well-born." As a movement it produced compulsory-sterilization and marriage laws, racially based immigration restriction, and ultimately the Nazi program of mass murder; discredited after 1945, its hereditarian claims about race and intelligence were repackaged and sustained through the postwar decades, and critics identify the same logic operating in the contemporary [[Transhumanism|transhumanist]] and longtermist movements.[^1][^2] + +### Galton and the Anglo-American Movement + +Galton set out the idea in *Hereditary Genius* (1869), arguing that talent and character are inherited and that the human stock could be improved by encouraging the able to have more children. The movement he founded split into "positive" eugenics, promoting reproduction among the favored, and "negative" eugenics, preventing it among the unfit, and it spread rapidly through the British and American professional classes in the early twentieth century. In Britain the [[Eugenics Society]], founded in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, gathered scientists and reformers, and Galton endowed a chair and laboratory at [[University College London]].[^1][^3] + +In the United States the movement acquired the machinery of the state. The biologist [[Charles Davenport]] established the Eugenics Record Office at [[Cold Spring Harbor]] in 1910, funded by the Harriman and Carnegie fortunes, to catalog American family pedigrees for "defective" traits. Eugenic argument shaped the [[Immigration Act of 1924]], which set national-origin quotas to limit southern and eastern European and Asian immigration, and underwrote compulsory-sterilization laws in more than thirty states. In *Buck v. Bell* (1927) the Supreme Court upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck, with Justice [[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.|Oliver Wendell Holmes]] writing "three generations of imbeciles are enough"; an estimated sixty thousand Americans were sterilized under such laws.[^2][^4] + +### Nazi Germany and the Postwar Discrediting + +Germany's eugenicists drew directly on the American model. The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which authorized the sterilization of some four hundred thousand people, was modeled in part on the California statute, and American eugenicists praised the German program before the war. The Nazi regime escalated from sterilization to the "T4" murder of disabled people and then to the racial extermination of the Holocaust, carried out in the name of racial hygiene.[^2][^5] + +The association with Nazi crimes discredited open eugenics after 1945, and the field publicly dissolved: the American Eugenics Society renamed itself the Society for the Study of Social Biology in 1972, and the British Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute. [[Julian Huxley]], who served as president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, argued for a reformed "evolutionary humanist" eugenics and, in 1957, coined the modern usage of "transhumanism" for the project of the species transcending itself through deliberate effort.[^3][^6] + +### Postwar Repackaging as Race Science + +The hereditarian study of race and intelligence continued through a small, well-funded network. The [[Pioneer Fund]], established in 1937 to promote "race betterment," financed researchers including [[Arthur Jensen]], whose 1969 article argued that the black-white IQ gap was substantially genetic, the physicist [[William Shockley]], who advocated paying low-IQ people to be sterilized, and later [[Richard Lynn]] and [[J. Philippe Rushton]], and it supported the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]]. [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* (1994) brought the race-and-IQ thesis to a mass audience, citing thirteen Pioneer Fund-funded scholars.[^7][^8] + +The same claims circulated under the euphemism [[Human Biodiversity|human biodiversity]], popularized by [[Steve Sailer]], and through the secret [[London Conference on Intelligence]] held at University College London from 2014 to 2017. Mainstream genetics and psychology reject the genetic-gap thesis, holding that race is not a valid biological category for the claims made and that group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors.[^8][^9] + +### The New Eugenics + +A "liberal eugenics" reappeared in academic bioethics, framed as private parental choice rather than state coercion. The Oxford bioethicist [[Julian Savulescu]] argued in 2001 for "procreative beneficence," the claim that parents using in-vitro fertilization have a moral reason to select the embryo expected to have the best life, including for non-disease traits. Companies such as [[Genomic Prediction]] began offering polygenic-score screening of embryos for traits including predicted intelligence, and in 2018 the Chinese scientist [[He Jiankui]] announced the birth of the first gene-edited human babies, made with CRISPR, drawing global condemnation.[^10][^11] + +### The TESCREAL Argument + +The philosopher [[Émile P. Torres]] and the computer scientist [[Timnit Gebru]] argue that the bundle of ideologies they label [[TESCREAL]], spanning transhumanism, [[Extropianism|extropianism]], singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]], and longtermism, descends from the same Anglo-American eugenics tradition and reproduces its logic of ranking and improving human cognitive capacity. They point to the recurrence of hereditarian and race-science claims among prominent figures in the movement, including the 1996 email in which [[Nick Bostrom]] asserted that black people are less intelligent than white people, and to the project, common across the bundle, of engineering a superior posthuman successor to current humanity.[^12][^13] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Galton, Francis. *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.* Macmillan, 1883, on the coinage of "eugenics"; and *Hereditary Genius* (1869). +[^2]: "Eugenics," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the positive and negative programs, the sterilization laws, Buck v. Bell, the 1924 Immigration Act, and the Nazi program. https://www.britannica.com/science/eugenics-genetics +[^3]: "A History of Eugenics," the Galton Institute (formerly the British Eugenics Society), on Galton, the 1907 founding, and the postwar renaming. https://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/ +[^4]: *Buck v. Bell,* 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Holmes, J.; and "Three Generations, No Imbeciles," Paul A. Lombardo, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. +[^5]: Black, Edwin. *War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.* Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, on the American model for the 1933 German sterilization law. +[^6]: Huxley, Julian. *New Bottles for New Wine.* Chatto and Windus, 1957, on "transhumanism"; and his presidency of the British Eugenics Society, 1959 to 1962. +[^7]: "Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the 1937 founding, the "race betterment" mission, and the funding of Jensen, Shockley, Lynn, and Rushton. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/pioneer-fund/ +[^8]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.* Free Press, 1994, with the afterword acknowledging the Pioneer Fund-funded sources. +[^9]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the scientific rejection of the hereditarian race-IQ thesis. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/ +[^10]: Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children." *Bioethics,* vol. 15, no. 5-6, 2001. +[^11]: "Chinese scientist who edited babies' genes jailed for three years," *The Guardian,* December 30, 2019, on He Jiankui and the 2018 CRISPR births. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/30/gene-editing-chinese-scientist-he-jiankui-jailed-three-years +[^12]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday,* April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 +[^13]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on the Bostrom email. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Extropianism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Extropianism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..513fb31c --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Extropianism.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Extropianism + - Transhumanism + - Libertarianism + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Cryonics + - Rationalism +alias: + - Extropians + - Extropy +summary: "Extropianism is the libertarian transhumanist movement founded by Max More in the late 1980s around the Extropy Institute and its 1990s mailing list, the seedbed from which Nick Bostrom's longtermism, the rationalist community, and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged." +location: "California" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Extropianism is the libertarian strand of [[Transhumanism|transhumanism]] founded by the British philosopher [[Max More]] in the late 1980s, organized around the [[Extropy Institute]] and its influential 1990s email list. It held that human beings should overcome their biological limits through technology, and it combined life extension, cryonics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and space settlement with an [[Anarcho-Capitalism|anarcho-capitalist]] and libertarian politics. The Extropians mailing list was the seedbed from which [[Nick Bostrom]]'s academic [[Longtermism|longtermism]], the [[Rationalist Community]], and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged.[^1][^2] + +### Origins and the Extropy Institute + +More, born Max O'Connor in England, coined the term "extropy" in 1988 as the opposite of entropy, denoting a measure of a system's intelligence, vitality, and capacity for growth. With the lawyer [[Tom W. Bell]] (who wrote as "Tom Morrow") he launched *Extropy* magazine, subtitled "The Journal of Transhumanist Thought," in 1988, and the two incorporated the Extropy Institute in California in 1990 to 1992. The institute published essays, held conferences, and ran one of the first major email lists devoted to transhumanist ideas. Its "Principles of Extropy," including perpetual progress, self-transformation, and the "proactionary principle" (a pro-technology answer to the precautionary principle), set out a creed of optimistic, individualist technological self-overcoming.[^1][^3] + +The institute ran a series of EXTRO conferences that gathered the movement and adjacent researchers: EXTRO 1 in Sunnyvale in 1994, keynoted by the robotics theorist [[Hans Moravec]] on "The Age of Robots"; EXTRO 2 in Santa Monica in 1995; EXTRO 3 in San Jose in 1997; and EXTRO 4 at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. More changed his own surname from O'Connor to "More" to express his commitment to "becoming better at everything," and the institute's documents framed aging and death as engineering problems to be solved rather than conditions to be accepted. The American futurist FM-2030, born Fereidoun Esfandiary, was an influence and fellow traveler of the early movement.[^3][^8] + +### The Mailing List as Seedbed + +The Extropians list in the 1990s drew an unusually consequential set of participants, among them the nanotechnology theorist [[Eric Drexler]], the economist [[Robin Hanson]], the cryptographers [[Hal Finney]] and [[Nick Szabo]] who later figured in the prehistory of [[Bitcoin]], and a young [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]. Nick Bostrom participated, and the racist email he later admitted to and apologized for in 2023 was sent to the Extropians list in 1996. The list functioned as the connective tissue linking the libertarian-transhumanist subculture to the AI-risk, rationalist, and crypto-libertarian movements that followed.[^2][^4] + +Hanson's later work on prediction markets, the "Great Filter," and the economics of brain emulation grew out of debates on the list, and his early-2000s blog [[Overcoming Bias]] became the platform on which Yudkowsky first published the essays that founded the rationalist community. The continuity of personnel is direct: the same individuals who argued on the Extropians list about cryonics, uploading, and machine intelligence in the 1990s reappear as the founders and funders of the 2000s institutions, with Bostrom building the academic [[Future of Humanity Institute]] and Yudkowsky the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], both pursuing the extropian agenda in more institutional and, in the AI-risk case, more pessimistic forms.[^2] + +### The Cypherpunk and Bitcoin Pipeline + +The Extropians list seeded the cryptography-and-privacy movement that later produced cryptocurrency. The engineer [[Timothy May]], himself an extropian, recruited Bay Area cryptographers and privacy activists and in 1992 cofounded the [[Cypherpunks]] mailing list with [[John Gilmore]] and [[Eric Hughes]], drawing heavily on the extropian membership; his "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" envisioned encryption as a tool to dissolve state control over money and information. Several extropian cypherpunks designed the digital-cash schemes that directly preceded Bitcoin: Nick Szabo's "bit gold," Hal Finney's reusable proof-of-work, and [[Wei Dai]]'s "b-money," the last two of which the pseudonymous [[Satoshi Nakamoto]] cited in the 2008 Bitcoin paper. The libertarian-transhumanist drive to escape the nation-state that animated the extropians runs directly into the cryptocurrency politics later embraced across the [[Peter Thiel]] network and the [[The Sovereign Individual|sovereign-individual]] thesis.[^6] + +Hal Finney was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction, sent by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009, and ran one of the earliest nodes; diagnosed with ALS, he died in 2014 and was cryopreserved at the [[Alcor Life Extension Foundation]], the cryonics company then run by Max More, closing the loop between the extropian commitment to defeating death and the financial technology the movement helped invent. The extropian wager that markets and encryption could route around the state, articulated on the list in the 1990s, supplied much of the ideological scaffolding for the crypto industry that emerged after 2009 and for its overlap with the effective-altruism and AI-risk funders, including the [[FTX]] collapse that later discredited part of that network.[^6] + +### Offshoots + +In 1998 Bostrom and the philosopher [[David Pearce]] founded the World Transhumanist Association (later [[Humanity Plus|Humanity+]]) as a more academic and technoprogressive vehicle, broadening transhumanism beyond the extropians' libertarianism. The Extropy Institute closed in 2006, with More stating that its core ideas had entered the mainstream. The extropian preoccupations, radical life extension, cryonics, mind uploading, AI, and escape from biological and political constraint, recur across the Thiel network's funding of longevity research, the [[Seasteading Institute]], and the AI-risk institutions, and supplied the intellectual vocabulary later inherited by the [[Effective Altruism]] movement. The critics [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] later grouped extropianism with transhumanism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism under the acronym "TESCREAL," arguing the bundle forms a single ideology of technological salvation favored by the tech elite.[^1][^5][^7] + +The World Transhumanist Association represented a political fork within the movement: where the extropians fused transhumanism with anarcho-capitalism, the WTA's founding documents, the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ, framed enhancement technologies in terms of rights, access, and democratic governance, and a "technoprogressive" wing led by the bioethicist [[James Hughes]] later split further from the libertarian strand. More's "proactionary principle" continued to circulate in policy debates as a counter to precaution-based regulation, and it resurfaced in the 2020s "effective accelerationist" current that opposed AI-safety restriction. The movement's own internal division between optimists who wanted to build superintelligence and the AI-risk camp who feared it, both descended from the same 1990s list, reproduced itself in Thiel's 2025 denunciation of Yudkowsky and Bostrom as figures who had turned "from transhumanism to Luddite."[^1][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Transhumanism," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Max More, the Extropy Institute, the extropian movement, and the 1998 founding of the World Transhumanist Association. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism +[^2]: Evans, Jules. "How did transhumanism become the religion of the super-rich?" on the Extropians list and its participants. https://julesevans.medium.com/how-did-transhumanism-become-the-religion-of-the-super-rich-d670a410b01a +[^3]: More, Max. "The Principles of Extropy" and "The Proactionary Principle," Extropy Institute, 1990s. +[^4]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on Bostrom's 1996 email to the Extropians list. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ +[^5]: More, Max, statement on the closure of the Extropy Institute, 2006. +[^6]: "How The Extropian Quest For Digital Cash Secured Our Trips To The Stars," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on Timothy May, the cypherpunks, and the extropian origins of bit gold, RPOW, and b-money. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-extropian-quest-for-digital-cash-secured-our-trips-to-the-stars +[^7]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism); see the *First Monday* and *Truthdig* treatments, 2023 onward. +[^8]: "Extropy Institute Resources," extropy.org events page, on the EXTRO conference series: EXTRO 1 (Sunnyvale, 1994, keynote Hans Moravec), EXTRO 2 (Santa Monica, 1995), EXTRO 3 (San Jose, 1997), and EXTRO 4 (UC Berkeley, 1999). https://www.extropy.org/events.htm diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Human Biodiversity.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Human Biodiversity.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..12b65161 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Human Biodiversity.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - HumanBiodiversity + - RaceScience + - Neoreaction + - Rationalism + - AltRight +alias: + - HBD +summary: "Human biodiversity (HBD) is a euphemism for hereditarian race science, popularized by Steve Sailer in the late 1990s, asserting genetically rooted differences in intelligence and behavior between racial groups, that became a connective doctrine linking the rationalist community, neoreaction, and the alt-right." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +Human biodiversity (HBD) is an umbrella term for the hereditarian claim that human populations differ in genetically rooted traits, including average intelligence and behavioral disposition, along racial lines. Mainstream genetics and anthropology reject the framework as a repackaging of scientific racism, holding that "race" is not a valid biological category for such claims and that observed group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors. The term was popularized by the journalist [[Steve Sailer]] in the late 1990s, and the doctrine became a connective tissue linking the [[Rationalist Community]], [[Neoreaction]], and the [[Alt-Right|alt-right]].[^1][^2] + +### Origins and the HBD Network + +Sailer founded an invitation-only Human Biodiversity Discussion Group mailing list around 1998, gathering academics and writers interested in hereditarian accounts of human difference. The framework drew on the race-and-IQ literature popularized by [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and on researchers associated with the [[Pioneer Fund]]. An online "HBD blogosphere" developed in the 2000s and 2010s around figures including the anthropologists [[Gregory Cochran]] and [[Henry Harpending]], coauthors of *The 10,000 Year Explosion*, and the science blogger [[Razib Khan]].[^1][^3] + +The phrase itself was not Sailer's coinage. The anthropologist [[Jonathan Marks]] used "human biodiversity" as the title of his 1995 book *Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History*, which argued against treating race as a meaningful biological category; Sailer appropriated the term in the mid-1990s and inverted its meaning into a banner for hereditarianism. The roster of his discussion group, dated March 3, 1999, listed dozens of writers and academics including Murray, [[J. Philippe Rushton]], the *National Review* columnist [[John Derbyshire]], the journalist [[Jon Entine]], and the physical anthropologist [[Vincent Sarich]], assembling in one forum the figures who would later seed the alt-right's "race realism."[^6][^7] + +### The Eugenics Research Network + +The hereditarian claims circulate through a small and interlocking institutional network. The Pioneer Fund has financed race-and-intelligence research since 1937, including the [[Ulster Institute for Social Research]] run by the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]] and the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]]. Between 2014 and 2017 a secret invitation-only [[London Conference on Intelligence]] met at [[University College London]], organized by the psychologist [[James Thompson]] and bringing together figures including [[Emil Kirkegaard]], who runs the non-peer-reviewed [[OpenPsych]] paper repository, Lynn, and the writer [[Kevin MacDonald]], described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a favored academic of the neo-Nazi movement. An analysis found that 82 percent of those who spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences were associated with the Ulster Institute or Mankind Quarterly. After the conference was exposed in 2018, the journalist [[Toby Young]] resigned from the UK Office for Students on the day his attendance was revealed, and the Cambridge researcher [[Noah Carl]] lost his fellowship. This network supplies the academic citations that HBD advocates present as suppressed science.[^5] + +The network's output flows through publications outside ordinary peer review. Kirkegaard's OpenPsych outlets and the Ulster Institute's Mankind Quarterly print hereditarian papers that mainstream journals reject, and Lynn's national-IQ dataset (built on samples as small as 19 people for a country) became the most-cited product of the operation before the [[European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association]] warned in 2020 that any analysis relying on it was unsound. In June 2024 seven scientists, including the evolutionary biologist [[Kevin Bird]], called on Elsevier and Springer to retract Lynn's articles. The same funding lineage runs from [[Wickliffe Draper]]'s Pioneer Fund through J. Philippe Rushton and Lynn, who served as the fund's successive presidents, into the citation pool that HBD bloggers and the tech-right treat as legitimate science.[^10][^11] + +### Laundering Into the Mainstream + +HBD functioned as a bridge by which race science migrated from the political fringe toward the technology elite. The rationalist blog [[Scott Alexander|Slate Star Codex]] treated HBD as a debatable hypothesis, and a 2014 email by its author, leaked in 2021, described the framework as "probably partially correct." [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s neoreaction incorporated hereditarian premises into its case against democratic equality, and the alt-right adopted "race realism" as a core tenet. The "forbidden knowledge" framing that valorizes suppressed hereditarian claims is the same posture marketed by the [[Hereticon]] "conference for thoughtcrime," and it surfaced in [[Nick Bostrom]]'s 1996 email and in the [[Peter Thiel]] network's broader anti-egalitarian politics.[^2][^4] + +The laundering proceeded through mainstream outlets willing to treat the claims as debatable. In 1994 the editor [[Andrew Sullivan]] ran a *Bell Curve* excerpt as the cover package of *[[The New Republic]]* over the threatened resignations of much of the staff, a moment he later called one of his proudest in journalism. In 2014 the former *[[The New York Times|New York Times]]* science writer [[Nicholas Wade]] published *A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History*, arguing that recent natural selection produced racial differences in social behavior; a letter signed by roughly 140 population geneticists, including [[David Reich]] and other leading researchers, appeared in the *New York Times Book Review* in August 2014 stating that there was "no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures." Sailer praised the book, and it became a standard HBD citation despite the disciplinary rejection.[^8][^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Human Biodiversity, Open Borders, IQ, and Western Civilization," CAIRCO, documenting Steve Sailer's role in popularizing the term and the HBD discussion group; treated as a record of the movement's self-description, not an endorsement. https://www.cairco.org/highlights/open-borders-iq-and-western-civilization +[^2]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the scientific rejection of hereditarian race-IQ claims. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/ +[^3]: Cochran, Gregory, and Henry Harpending. *The 10,000 Year Explosion.* Basic Books, 2009. +[^4]: "The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer," archiving the 2014 email published by Topher Brennan in February 2021. https://gist.github.com/segyges/f540a3dadeb42f49c0b0ab4244e43a55 +[^5]: "London Conference on Intelligence exposes link between academic promotion of eugenics and Conservative right," TruePublica, 2018, and World Socialist Web Site coverage of the conference, the Pioneer Fund, Mankind Quarterly, and the Toby Young and Noah Carl episodes. https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/london-conference-intelligence-exposes-link-academic-promotion-eugenics-conservative-right/ +[^6]: Marks, Jonathan. *Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History.* Aldine de Gruyter, 1995, the anthropological origin of the term, which argued against race as a biological category. +[^7]: "Human Biodiversity: Eugenics of the Alt-Right," *The Forward,* on Sailer's appropriation of the term and the discussion-group membership; recorded as documentation of the movement, not endorsement. https://forward.com/opinion/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/ +[^8]: "Responses to The New Republic's 'Bell Curve' Excerpt," *The New Republic,* and Andrew Sullivan's later account, on the 1994 cover package and staff objections. https://newrepublic.com/article/120890/responses-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt +[^9]: "Geneticists decry book on race and evolution," *Science,* August 2014, on the roughly 140-signatory letter against Nicholas Wade's *A Troublesome Inheritance.* https://www.science.org/content/article/geneticists-decry-book-race-and-evolution +[^10]: "Another failure to replicate Lynn's estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans," Jelte Wicherts et al., *Intelligence,* 2010, and the 2020 European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association warning against Lynn's national-IQ dataset. https://jeltewicherts.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/wichertsravenafr2010rej.pdf +[^11]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on the small-sample national-IQ figures and the seven-scientist retraction call. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/INTELLIGENCE/Thiel Influence Network.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/INTELLIGENCE/Thiel Influence Network.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2018510e --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/INTELLIGENCE/Thiel Influence Network.md @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +--- +category: "Intelligence Concept" +tags: + - Concept + - ThielInfluenceNetwork + - PeterThiel + - InfluenceOperations + - DarkMoney + - ConveningNetworks +alias: + - Thiel Network + - Thiel Infrastructure +summary: "The Thiel Influence Network is the set of overlapping commercial, convening, ideological, and political vehicles built around Peter Thiel since 2002, including the Thiel Fellowship, Founders Fund, Palantir Technologies, Dialog, Hereticon, Per Aspera Policy, and Teneo Network, each operating at a different stage of recruitment, capital deployment, or institutional positioning." +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +The Thiel Influence Network is the set of overlapping commercial, convening, ideological, and political vehicles built around [[Peter Thiel]] since the 2002 sale of [[PayPal]]. The network comprises at least eight layers operating at different stages of recruitment, capital deployment, convening, and institutional positioning: the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Rationalist Community]] it seeded (ideological incubation), the [[Thiel Fellowship]] (recruitment of young founders), the [[Founders Fund]] portfolio (commercial investment), [[Palantir Technologies]] (government contracting and data infrastructure), [[Dialog]] (wide convening), [[Hereticon]] (narrower heterodoxy convening), the [[Per Aspera Policy]] political-action vehicle (dark-money electoral spending), and the [[Teneo Network]] (conservative-leadership placement across American institutions). The 2026 Dialog leak exposed the membership of the widest convening layer.[^1][^2] + +### The Commercial Layer + +The commercial layer is the Founders Fund portfolio and Palantir Technologies. Founders Fund, founded in 2005, is the venture vehicle that concentrates capital in firms pursuing monopoly positions in foundational technology categories (payments, defense, space, biotechnology). Palantir Technologies, founded in 2003, is the government-contracting vehicle that supplies data-fusion infrastructure to the intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies. The two firms are the financial and operational base of the network: Founders Fund produces the returns and identifies the talent; Palantir Technologies produces the government client relationships and the privatized-state-capacity infrastructure.[^3] + +The [[PayPal Mafia]] cohort is the original commercial layer from which the others were built. The PayPal founders and early executives who dispersed into subsequent ventures, including [[Elon Musk]], [[Reid Hoffman]], [[Max Levchin]], [[David Sacks]], [[Ken Howery]], [[Luke Nosek]], [[Roelof Botha]], and [[Keith Rabois]], form the recurring capital, endorsement, and board network that underwrites the subsequent Founders Fund and Palantir Technologies deals. Six members of the PayPal Mafia appear on the leaked 2026 Dialog retreat roster.[^1] + +### The Convening Layers + +The convening function operates across at least three documented tiers. Dialog, founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and [[Auren Hoffman]], is the widest tier, convening a 222-name 2026 retreat roster that spans sitting U.S. senators of both parties, an active four-star NATO commander (General [[Alexus Grynkewich]]), sitting technology executives, and venture capitalists. Dialog operates under off-the-record rules with no published attendee list and no press access. The 2026 registration fee was reported as exceeding 16,000 dollars.[^1] + +Hereticon, founded in 2019 and organized by [[Mike Solana]] of Founders Fund, is the narrower tier, self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime" and oriented to ideological heterodoxy, life-extension research, UFO claims, and defense-technology ethics. The Hereticon invitation list is more selective than the Dialog list and draws more heavily on the Founders Fund portfolio and the Thiel-network ideological principals. The two convenings share the Founders Fund financial base and the Thiel reputational base, and the same individuals appear across both.[^4] + +A third convening tier, the Teneo Network, operates in the conservative institutional sphere rather than in the technology sphere. Founded in 2008 by [[Evan Baehr]] and [[Josh Hawley]] and chaired since 2021 by [[Leonard Leo]], Teneo is a members-only conservative-leadership organization whose stated goal is to place conservatives across American law, finance, media, academia, and culture. The Teneo network overlaps with the Thiel network at the level of shared donor infrastructure and shared ideological framing around the rollback of liberal institutional dominance, and Baehr moved in the Thiel orbit before founding Teneo.[^5] + +### The Recruitment Layer + +The Thiel Fellowship, founded in 2010, is the recruitment layer. The fellowship awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college, and it identifies high-potential individuals at the point of educational exit rather than at the point of commercial or political entry. The fellowship alumni roster includes [[Vitalik Buterin]] (Ethereum), [[Austin Russell]] (Luminar Technologies), [[Laura Deming]] (Longevity Fund), and [[Ritesh Agarwal]] (Oyo Rooms). Fellows receive access to the Thiel Foundation network of founders, investors, and scientists, and the cohort forms a peer network that persists past the award period.[^6] + +The recruitment function extends to the political layer. In the [[JD Vance]] trajectory, Thiel hired Vance at [[Mithril Capital]] in 2017, backed his venture firm [[Narya Capital]], donated approximately fifteen million dollars to the [[Protect Ohio Values]] super PAC for his 2022 Senate primary, and brokered his 2024 vice-presidential nomination. The Vance trajectory compressed a three-and-a-half-year path from private citizen to Vice President on a single-donor financial base. Josh Hawley's path from Teneo cofounder to elected office follows the same pattern of network-based political recruitment.[^7][^5] + +### The Ideological Seedbed Layer + +Before the convening and political layers, Thiel funded the intellectual subculture that supplied much of the network's worldview. From 2005 he was the earliest prominent backer of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), founded by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], and in 2006 he cofounded its conference, the [[Singularity Summit]], with Yudkowsky and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]]. The donations, later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars, helped seed the Bay Area rationalist scene and the overlapping [[Effective Altruism]] movement, whose 2013 summit Thiel keynoted.[^15] + +The same milieu incubated a cluster of groups described as cults: [[Leverage Research]] under [[Geoff Anders]], the [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] circle, and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] formation that was tied to six killings across three states between 2022 and 2025. Cult dynamics recur as a theme across the network: Thiel's 2014 book *[[Zero to One]]* describes the best startups as "slightly less extreme kinds of cults," Dialog placed a "cult-building" session on its 2026 retreat agenda, and Hereticon programs heterodox content adjacent to the rationalist and transhumanist subcultures. Thiel broke with the AI-risk wing in 2025, naming Yudkowsky alongside [[Nick Bostrom]] and [[Greta Thunberg]] as a "legionnaire of the Antichrist" in his leaked San Francisco lecture series.[^16] + +### The Political and Dark-Money Layer + +The Per Aspera Policy vehicle is the dark-money layer. [[OpenSecrets]] reported in February 2022 that Per Aspera Policy, a Thiel-tied 501(c)(4) organization, steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the Protect Ohio Values super PAC alongside Thiel's direct contributions. The 501(c)(4) form permits political spending without donor disclosure, unlike the disclosed super-PAC spending. The [[Campaign Legal Center]] filed an FEC complaint in June 2022 alleging illegal coordination between Protect Ohio Values and the Vance campaign; the FEC dismissed the complaint in 2024.[^8] + +The political layer extends through the Teneo Network's placement infrastructure and through the broader Leonard Leo dark-money operation, which directed approximately one billion dollars into the conservative judicial-selection project through the [[Judicial Crisis Network]] and linked vehicles. The Thiel and Leo networks overlap at the level of donor infrastructure and ideological framing, and both operate through the 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(3) structures that permit political and ideological spending with limited disclosure.[^5] + +### The Epstein Document Thread + +The unsealed [[Jeffrey Epstein]] document releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) in 2025 and 2026 surfaced a correspondence between Epstein and Thiel that runs from 2011 through 2019, eight years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement. The primary-document index maintained by Tommy Carstensen, cross-referencing the EFTA releases, documents the key exchanges by document ID. On February 6, 2016, Epstein wrote in an email (EFTA01738574) that "peter thiel LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea.. he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far." Reid Hoffman hosted an August 2015 dinner in [[Palo Alto]] (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) whose guest list included Thiel, [[Mark Zuckerberg]], Elon Musk, [[Joi Ito]] of the [[MIT Media Lab]], and Epstein. *Jacobin* reported in April 2026 that hundreds of emails document Epstein's encouragement of Thiel's political trajectory, including a February 2013 audio recording of Epstein advising Thiel.[^9][^10][^11] + +The 2015 dinner guest list (EFTA00344556, EFTA00344564) included Thiel, Ito, and Epstein together, documenting co-presence on a single occasion. The triangular Thiel-Ito-Epstein "secret society" thread is now substantiated at the level of co-presence rather than at the level of a specific recorded three-way discussion. The Ito-Epstein-MIT Media Lab funding relationship is documented separately through [[Ronan Farrow]]'s *New Yorker* reporting (September 2019). + +The Carstensen index documents additional Thiel-Epstein exchanges including a 2014 meeting at the Epstein townhouse attended by CIA director [[William Burns|William J. Burns]] and a separate occasion on which Thiel lunched with the Russian UN ambassador [[Vitaly Churkin]] (EFTA01469750). The Burns co-presence placed the CIA director and a major CIA contractor's chairman (Thiel) in the same room on an occasion organized by Epstein, the specific documented overlap between the intelligence-community leadership and the Thiel commercial network on Epstein-mediated terrain. + +Epstein separately pitched Palantir to [[Ehud Barak|former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak]] in emails that name Thiel, extending the documented Thiel-Epstein-Barak triangle into the Israeli-intelligence and defense-contracting sphere. Barak, the former prime minister and defense minister, was a documented Epstein associate who visited the Epstein residence repeatedly, and the Epstein-Barak-Thiel email chain is the channel through which Epstein attempted to broker a Palantir investment from Barak. + +The 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Epstein in November 2012 (DOJ document D-23831) placed Epstein on the Dialog circulation list. The [[New York Times]] reported in May 2023 that Thiel met with Epstein multiple times in 2014. The documented Thiel-Epstein relationship runs from 2011 through 2019, eight years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement, which is the timeframe over which the Dialog convening, the Palantir government-contracting expansion, and the [[Neoreaction]]-patronage intellectual project were all being built out in parallel.[^1][^12][^13][^14] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ +[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein document release. 2013 Dialog retreat invitation forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein, November 2012. Document D-23831. https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831 +[^3]: For the Founders Fund and Palantir Technologies commercial layer, see the dedicated pages and the underlying SEC EDGAR filings and corporate records. +[^4]: "Peter Thiel's VC Firm Founders Fund Announces Hereticon." *Business Insider,* October 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-vc-firm-founders-fund-hereticon-conference-immortality-ufo-2019-10 +[^5]: "Inside the 'Private and Confidential' Conservative Group That Promises to 'Crush Liberal Dominance.'" *ProPublica,* March 15, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents +[^6]: Thiel Fellowship. Official program site. https://thielfellowship.org/ +[^7]: "The billionaire who fueled JD Vance's rapid rise to the Trump VP spot." *CBS News,* 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-trump-vp-peter-thiel-billionaire/ +[^8]: "Peter Thiel-tied dark money group helping bankroll super PAC." *OpenSecrets,* February 2022. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-tied-dark-money-group-helping-bankroll-super-pac-spending-on-2022-election/ +[^9]: "Jeffrey Epstein Encouraged Peter Thiel's Political Journey." *Jacobin,* April 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/04/epstein-thiel-tech-finance-trump +[^10]: "Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein Had a Yearslong Relationship." *Jacobin,* March 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/03/thiel-epstein-barak-ai-israel +[^11]: "What Peter Thiel Saw in Jeffrey Epstein." *The Nation,* 2026. https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=586795 +[^12]: "Peter Thiel Is Latest Billionaire Said to Have Met With Jeffrey Epstein." *New York Times,* May 18, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/jeffrey-epstein-peter-thiel.html +[^13]: Farrow, Ronan. "MIT Media Lab Acknowledges It Had a Deeper Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein Than Previously Disclosed." *The New Yorker,* September 2019. +[^14]: Tommy Carstensen Epstein Files index, "Peter Thiel," cross-referencing the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) document releases, including EFTA01738574 (Feb 6, 2016 "secret society" email), EFTA00344556 and EFTA00344564 (2015 dinner guest list), and EFTA01469750 (Thiel-Churkin lunch). https://tommycarstensen.com/epstein/people/peter-thiel.html +[^15]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel funding the Singularity Institute from 2005 and cofounding the 2006 Singularity Summit; and Peter Thiel keynote, 2013 Effective Altruism Summit. +[^16]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One.* Crown Business, 2014, on startups as "slightly less extreme kinds of cults"; and "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Neoreaction.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Neoreaction.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..947314cf --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Neoreaction.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Neoreaction + - NRx + - DarkEnlightenment + - Moldbug + - NickLand + - PeterThiel +alias: + - NRx +summary: "Neoreaction (NRx) is the political-philosophical movement founded by Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug) through his blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 onward, which argues that liberal democracy is a failing theocratic successor to mainline Protestantism and should be replaced by corporate sovereign entities under neocameral governance." +created: 2026-06-17 +updated: 2026-06-17 +--- + +Neoreaction (NRx) is the political-philosophical movement founded by [[Curtis Yarvin]] under the pen name [[Moldbug]] through his blog *Unqualified Reservations*, active from 2007. The movement holds that liberal democracy is a failing state form, specifically that the 20th-century democratic state is a theocratic successor to [[Mainline Protestantism|mainline Protestant Christianity]] (a structure Yarvin termed [[The Cathedral]]), and that the appropriate replacement is sovereign territory held as corporate property under absolute executive governance, a structure Yarvin termed [[Neocameralism]]. NRx is the political-organizational expression of the broader [[Dark Enlightenment]] ideological current and is the intellectual framework most prominently patronized by [[Peter Thiel]].[^1][^2] + +NRx connects the [[PayPal Mafia]] commercial network to the post-2016 Republican political coalition. The movement's argument is that the privatization and concentration of state capacity is not a pragmatic policy preference but a civilizational necessity. The Thiel network applies that argument across the Palantir Technologies government contracts, the Dialog convening, and the JD Vance and Blake Masters candidacies. NRx supplies the doctrine; the Thiel network supplies the implementation.[^4] + +### The Cathedral and the Theocratic-State Thesis + +The Cathedral is Yarvin's central analytic concept and the foundation of the rest of the argument. The thesis is that the institutional complex of universities, mainstream media, foundations, and civil-service agencies functions as a single interlocking theocracy, descended historically from mainline Protestant Christianity, whose doctrines (egalitarianism, universalism, human rights, antiracism) are religious rather than empirical claims dressed in secular language. On this account, the elected branches of government are not the real sovereign; the permanent institutions that produce the consensus within which elected officials operate are the real sovereign, and elections are a ritual that ratifies rather than decides.[^1] + +The Cathedral thesis explains why democratic politics, in Yarvin's view, never produces the outcomes the formal theory of democracy predicts. If the real sovereign is the institutional consensus-producing apparatus, then replacing elected officials changes nothing, because the new officials are selected and socialized by the same apparatus. The implication is that the apparatus itself must be replaced, which is the constructive work the neocameral proposal is meant to address. The Cathedral concept has propagated beyond the neoreactionary core into broader right-wing discourse as a shorthand for institutional media-and-academia bias.[^1] + +### Neocameralism and the Joint-Stock State + +Neocameralism is Yarvin's proposed replacement for the democratic state. The structure is a joint-stock corporation that holds sovereign territory as its asset, with shares owned by investors and governance vested in a chief executive appointed by the shareholders with absolute operational authority. The executive's incentive structure, on Yarvin's account, is to maximize the capital value of the sovereign territory (and thus the share price), which would produce better governance than the electoral incentive, because the shareholder's interest in long-run asset value aligns with the resident's interest in being well-governed.[^1] + +The proposed model is explicitly based on historical chartered-company governance, particularly the [[British East India Company]] and the [[Dutch East India Company]], and on the contemporary example of Singapore under [[Lee Kuan Yew]]. Yarvin's claim is not that neocameralism is politically likely in the near term but that it is structurally correct and that the role of the neoreactionary is to maintain the intellectual infrastructure for a future transition. The constructive argument is continuous with the broader libertarian-to-anarcho-capitalist tradition, but differs in holding that the correct successor to the state is a single sovereign property holder rather than a market of competing governance providers.[^1] + +### The Dark Enlightenment and Nick Land + +The Dark Enlightenment is the broader ideological current, named in a 2012 series by the British philosopher [[Nick Land]], that incorporates NRx and related arguments. Land, formerly of the [[CCRU]] at the [[University of Warwick]], contributed the metaphysical and technological register: his right-accelerationist writings argued that capitalism and technological change are forces that should be allowed to dissolve the existing political order without restraint, and that the democratic state is an obstacle to the necessary acceleration. Land's framing supplied the [[Accelerationism|accelerationist]] dimension; Yarvin's supplied the institutional and procedural dimension.[^2] + +The synthesis is the Dark Enlightenment proper, and the relationship between its two originating figures tracks their comparative advantages. Land is the systematic philosopher who supplies the theoretical case that democratic governance is in fundamental tension with the trajectory of technological capitalism; Yarvin is the political architect who supplies the institutional proposal for what replaces it. The Dark Enlightenment is the frame within which the funded neoreactionary movement (the Yarvin-Thiel patronage) and the broader intellectual current operate, and the term is used interchangeably with NRx in much of the secondary literature, though strictly the Dark Enlightenment is the parent frame and NRx its political-organizational variant.[^2] + +### The Violent-Accelerationist Divergence + +NRx and the violent Accelerationism of the [[James Mason]] *[[Siege]]* tradition share a diagnosis of liberal democratic failure but diverge on method. Both currents hold that liberal democracy is failing or failed; both cite overlapping sources in the reactionary and anti-egalitarian traditions. The accelerationist tradition ([[Atomwaffen Division]], [[The Base]], [[Terrorgram Collective]]) holds that the system should be collapsed by targeted paramilitary violence to produce revolutionary conditions and that the lone-wolf attacker is the ideal actor.[^3] + +NRx holds, conversely, that the collapse is occurring of its own accord and that the role of the neoreactionary is to build the institutional successor (the neocameral firm, the Urbit digital sovereignty stack, the privately held intelligence-and-data infrastructure) that will inherit the territory when the collapse completes. The two currents are not in organizational contact and their methods are incompatible, but they share enough of the diagnostic frame that the boundary between them is a recurring subject of online dispute. NRx is a funded, capital-intensive, procedural movement whose principals move in Thiel-network commercial and political circles; the violent accelerationist current is an underground paramilitary network whose principals are prosecuted under federal terrorism statutes.[^3] + +### The Thiel Network and Operationalization + +The patronage of Peter Thiel and the implementation work of the broader Thiel network operationalize the NRx thesis. Thiel's 2009 [[Cato Unbound]] essay "The Education of a Libertarian" ("I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible") is the public statement of the conversion. Thiel's subsequent commercial and political activity tracks the NRx thesis: the Palantir Technologies government-contracting model (privately held data-fusion infrastructure supplied to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies) is the commercial instance of the argument that state capacity should be privatized; the Dialog convening network is where the commercial principals, the political principals, and the government clients meet off the record.[^4] + +The political instances are the JD Vance and Blake Masters campaigns. Vance, the largest single Thiel super PAC investment (approximately fifteen million dollars in the 2022 Ohio Senate primary), is now Vice President of the United States; Masters, coauthor with Thiel of *Zero to One* and former Thiel Capital president, ran for the Senate from Arizona in 2022. The presence of NRx-adjacent figures in executive-branch positions in the second Trump administration is the current political realization of the procedural-seizure program Yarvin articulated, and the 2026 Dialog leak's exposure of the off-the-record convening network is the first primary record of the institutional site at which the operationalization is coordinated.[^4] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Yarvin, Curtis (Moldbug). "Unqualified Reservations" (blog), 2007 onward, and subsequent collected writings (including the *Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations* and the *Open Letter* series). +[^2]: Land, Nick. "The Dark Enlightenment" (series), 2012 onward, and the broader CCRU-era writings on right-accelerationism. +[^3]: For the violent accelerationist tradition, see the vault's Accelerationism page and its primary sources, including James Mason, *Siege* (1980-1986, compiled 1992), and the documented histories of Atomwaffen Division, The Base, and Terrorgram Collective. +[^4]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Rationalist Community.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Rationalist Community.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7766f2bd --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Rationalist Community.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Rationalism + - LessWrong + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Transhumanism + - EffectiveAltruism + - Subculture +alias: + - LessWrong + - The Rationalists + - Rationalist Movement + - Bay Area Rationalists +summary: "The Rationalist Community is the Bay Area subculture that formed around Eliezer Yudkowsky's LessWrong writings and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in the late 2000s, organized around probability-based reasoning and artificial-intelligence existential risk, and from whose social network the Effective Altruism movement and the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations all emerged." +location: "San Francisco Bay Area" +created: 2026-06-19 +updated: 2026-06-19 +--- + +The Rationalist Community is the subculture that formed in the late 2000s around the online writings of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], the discussion forum [[LessWrong]], and the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI), concentrated geographically in [[Berkeley]] and the wider [[San Francisco Bay Area]]. Its members organized their self-understanding around Bayesian probability, the identification and correction of cognitive bias, and the conviction that an unaligned artificial superintelligence was the foremost threat to human survival. The community produced the institutional infrastructure of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and the social network from which the [[Leverage Research]] organization, the [[Michael Vassar|Vassarite]] tendency, and the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] formation were recruited.[^1][^2] + +### Origins and Core Texts + +The community's founding text is the "Sequences," the run of essays Yudkowsky wrote between 2006 and 2009, first on the blog [[Overcoming Bias]] (which he shared with the economist [[Robin Hanson]]) and then on LessWrong, which launched in 2009. The essays argued that ordinary human reasoning is systematically distorted by bias and that a trainable discipline of probabilistic thinking could correct it. Yudkowsky's 2010 serialized work of fiction *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* drew a large readership into the forum and functioned as the community's primary recruitment device.[^1][^3] + +The community's lineage runs back through the 1990s [[Extropianism|extropian]] mailing list, where Yudkowsky, Hanson, and [[Nick Bostrom]] all participated before LessWrong existed, inheriting from the extropians the preoccupations with life extension, mind uploading, and machine superintelligence that the rationalists reframed in the language of cognitive bias and Bayesian decision theory. The Bay Area scene materialized as a network of shared "group houses," many clustered on and around Ward Street in Berkeley, into which young adherents arriving from college would rent rooms; the houses, the mailing lists, and the CFAR workshops formed the in-person spine of the milieu through the 2010s before much of it dispersed during the pandemic.[^9][^10] + +### Institutions + +The community's organizational core was MIRI and its 2012 spin-off the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR), which taught the community's techniques through residential workshops. The two organizations shared a Berkeley social world of group houses, mailing lists, and annual gatherings. [[Peter Thiel]] funded MIRI from 2005 and cofounded the [[Singularity Summit]], the community's early public-facing conference, in 2006, making him the most prominent early patron of the milieu in its formative decade.[^4][^5] + +The community overlapped heavily with the Effective Altruism movement, which emerged from the same period and personnel and shared the longtermist concern with AI risk and the far future. The blog [[Slate Star Codex]], written by the psychiatrist [[Scott Alexander]] (Scott Siskind), became a second major hub of the subculture in the 2010s.[^2] + +In June 2020 Alexander deleted Slate Star Codex after a *New York Times* reporter preparing a profile declined to withhold his legal surname, which he said would endanger his psychiatric patients and expose him to renewed death threats; the takedown became a cause within the rationalist and tech worlds, and the *Times* published its piece in February 2021. Alexander relaunched on Substack as Astral Codex Ten on January 21, 2021, writing under his first and middle name, Scott Alexander, and his full legal name, Scott Siskind, entered wide circulation through the *Times* article. The dispute pulled in *Reason,* the *National Review,* and figures across the technology industry who treated the paper's handling of the case as evidence of a double standard in its sourcing policies.[^11] + +### Cult Formations and Internal Harm + +The community's high-intensity culture of self-improvement, its practice of "debugging" (long, confrontational sessions aimed at correcting a person's psychology), and its apocalyptic framing of AI risk preceded a series of psychological crises and the formation of several groups described as cults. [[Geoff Anders]] ran Leverage Research, which recruited from the milieu and which former members described as practicing coercive psychological control. Michael Vassar, a former president of MIRI, built a circle that recruited from the MIRI and CFAR network and used confrontational sessions and psychedelics to "jailbreak" members. The Zizians, the formation led by [[Jack LaSota]] that was later tied to six killings across three states, emerged as a splinter of this community after LaSota attended CFAR programs and broke with the milieu.[^5][^6][^7] + +A 2023 *Bloomberg* investigation documented multiple accounts of psychological abuse, sexual misconduct, and coercion across rationalist group houses and organizations, and the community's own forums hosted extended first-person accounts of harm at Leverage, MIRI, and CFAR. The cult dynamics and the AI-doom framing of the subculture are the elements [[Dialog]] placed on its 2026 retreat agenda as a "cult-building" session and that [[Hereticon]], the [[Founders Fund]] conference, programs as heterodox content.[^6][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Rationality: From AI to Zombies* (collected "Sequences," 2006 through 2009). Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2015. +[^2]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023, on the rationalist origins of effective altruism and longtermism. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism +[^3]: Yudkowsky, Eliezer. *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,* serialized 2010 through 2015. +[^4]: Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025. +[^5]: "My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe +[^6]: "Zoe Curzi's Experience with Leverage Research," LessWrong, October 2021; first-person disclosure-side account. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPwEptSSFRCnfHqFk/zoe-curzi-s-experience-with-leverage-research +[^7]: "The Radicalization of Ziz LaSota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader," *Rolling Stone,* 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/ +[^8]: "Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News," reporting on *Bloomberg* investigation, 2023; discussion archived on the EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg +[^9]: Evans, Jules. "How did transhumanism become the religion of the super-rich?" on the overlap of the 1990s extropian list with the later rationalist and AI-risk figures. https://julesevans.medium.com/how-did-transhumanism-become-the-religion-of-the-super-rich-d670a410b01a +[^10]: "The rationalist community's location problem" and contemporary accounts of the Berkeley group houses clustered around Ward Street and the pandemic-era dispersal. LessWrong / GreaterWrong. https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FghubkDy6Dp6mnxk7/the-rationalist-community-s-location-problem +[^11]: "The Slate Star Codex 'Doxxing' Is the Latest Squabble Inside New York Times," *The Daily Beast,* 2020, on the June 23, 2020 takedown, the February 2021 *Times* article, and the January 21, 2021 relaunch as Astral Codex Ten. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/BlackNet.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/BlackNet.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..44c6f819 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/BlackNet.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Scientific Theory & Technology" +tags: + - Concept + - BlackNet + - Cypherpunks + - CryptoAnarchy + - DigitalCash + - Anonymity + - TimothyMay +alias: + - BlackNet +summary: "BlackNet was Timothy May's 1993 thought experiment for an anonymous information market built on public-key encryption, remailers, message pools, and digital cash, circulated on the cypherpunks list as a working precursor to dark markets and anonymous-leak platforms." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +BlackNet was an anonymous information market that the former [[Intel]] scientist [[Timothy May]] described and circulated in 1993 as a proof of concept for the [[Cypherpunks]] movement, using public-key encryption, chains of anonymous remailers, publicly readable message pools, and untraceable digital cash to let parties buy and sell information without ever learning one another's identities. May seeded it on the cypherpunks mailing list and through remailers, later acknowledging that he had written it to demonstrate that crypto-anarchist information markets were already technically possible.[^1][^2] + +### The BlackNet Message + +The BlackNet announcement opened "Your name has come to our attention. We have reason to believe you may be interested in the products and services our new organization, BlackNet, has to offer. BlackNet is in the business of buying, selling, trading, and otherwise dealing with *information* in all its many forms." It solicited "trade secrets, processes, production methods," along with "nanotechnology and related techniques," chemical-manufacturing methods, product and business plans, and other restricted material, and it offered to sell the same. It told correspondents to reach it by posting [[Pretty Good Privacy|PGP]]-encrypted messages through an anonymous remailer chain to public forums such as Usenet groups and mailing lists, where the operators could read them without any return path existing.[^3] + +The message framed its security in cryptographic terms, promising "public key cryptosystems with essentially perfect security" and assuring respondents that "unless you tell us who you are (please don't!) or inadvertently reveal information which provides clues, we have no way of identifying you." For payment it accepted "anonymous deposits to the bank account of your choice," cash sent by mail, or "CryptoCredits," a closed-loop internal currency for use within the market. The design used a message pool, a widely broadcast public space where anyone could deposit and read messages anonymously, so that neither buyer nor seller had to connect to the other directly and the market itself had no fixed address to seize.[^3][^1] + +### Crypto-Anarchy and Distribution + +BlackNet was an application of the crypto-anarchist program May had set out in "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" of 1988 and developed in his 1994 reference document the Cyphernomicon. It combined the cypherpunk toolkit already in use on the list, PGP encryption, the remailer chains descended from the work of [[John Gilmore]] and [[Eric Hughes]], and the anonymous digital cash modeled on [[David Chaum]]'s blind-signature schemes, into a single illustration of an untraceable market for forbidden information. May posted the design anonymously and let it propagate through remailers, and in his essay "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities" he described BlackNet as "a system which appeared in 1993 and which allows fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts."[^4][^2] + +The text spread widely and reached United States government research sites; May recorded that the message turned up at Defense Department national laboratories and drew official attention, after which he acknowledged authorship and explained that he had built it as a teaching example rather than a live operation. He treated the exercise as proof that the components already existed, so that the question was not whether such markets could be built but what would follow once they were. The market relied on no central server or operator who could be compelled to identify users.[^2][^1] + +### Precursor to Dark Markets and Leak Platforms + +BlackNet anticipated the structure of the anonymous information markets and leak platforms that emerged in the following two decades. Its message pool and remailer architecture prefigured the anonymous submission systems of [[WikiLeaks]], which built its early intake on encryption and remailer-style anonymity drawn from the same cypherpunk practice, and its combination of an anonymous market with untraceable digital cash prefigured the cryptocurrency dark markets such as the Silk Road that followed [[Bitcoin]]. The digital-cash element of BlackNet pointed at the gap that Chaum's centralized [[eCash]] could not fill and that the later proof-of-work currencies, [[Adam Back]]'s [[Hashcash]], [[Nick Szabo]]'s [[bit gold]], [[Wei Dai]]'s [[b-money]], and finally Bitcoin, were built to close.[^1][^5] + +May's premise, that strong encryption and anonymous payment would let information and money escape state control, was the same premise the cypherpunk digital-cash thread carried into Bitcoin and that WikiLeaks tested against the banking system in 2010. BlackNet itself never operated as a real market; it stood as a demonstration that the tools were in hand.[^2][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Dark Markets: Tim May's BlackNet," *ChainRift Research,* on the 1993 design, the remailers, PGP, the message pool, CryptoCredits, and the items solicited. https://medium.com/chainrift-research/dark-markets-tim-mays-blacknet-7b7738e0617c +[^2]: May, Timothy C. "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities," 1994, describing BlackNet as a 1993 system for fully anonymous two-way exchanges of information and noting its appearance at Defense Department labs. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-virtual-comm.html +[^3]: May, Timothy C. "BlackNet" message, 1993, on the opening text, the public-key-cryptosystem promise, the CryptoCredits payment, the anonymous bank deposits, and the remailer-and-Usenet contact method. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/blacknet.txt +[^4]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994, on BlackNet within the crypto-anarchist program and the cypherpunk toolkit. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt +[^5]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on the digital-cash precursors of bit gold, RPOW, and b-money. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Cybernetics.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Cybernetics.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4def7621 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Cybernetics.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +category: "Scientific Theory & Technology" +tags: + - Concept + - Cybernetics + - SystemsTheory + - InformationTheory + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Counterculture +alias: + - Cybernetic + - Macy Conferences +summary: "Cybernetics is the postwar science of control and communication in animals and machines, founded by Norbert Wiener and developed at the Macy Conferences, which diffused into computing, systems theory, artificial intelligence, and the Californian counterculture." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Cybernetics is the postwar interdisciplinary science of control and communication in the animal and the machine, founded by the mathematician [[Norbert Wiener]] and formalized at the Macy Conferences held in New York from 1946 to 1953. Drawing on feedback, information, and circular causality as its central concepts, it sought a single theory of regulation applicable to organisms, machines, brains, economies, and societies alike. Its vocabulary and methods diffused into digital computing, [[Systems Theory|systems theory]], the cognitive sciences, [[Artificial Intelligence|artificial intelligence]], and the Whole Earth strand of the Californian counterculture.[^1][^2] + +### Norbert Wiener and the Founding Texts + +Norbert Wiener, a prodigy mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek for "steersman" and published the founding text *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine* in 1948. The book grew out of his wartime work on anti-aircraft fire-control systems, in which he and the engineer Julian Bigelow modeled the gunner, the gun, and the target as a single feedback loop, an approach he generalized with the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth into a theory of goal-directed, self-correcting behavior. Negative feedback, the process by which a system senses the gap between its output and a goal and adjusts to reduce it, became the organizing idea, applicable equally to a thermostat, a nervous system, and a guided missile.[^1][^3] + +In 1950 Wiener followed with *The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society*, a popular work that extended the theory to social and ethical questions, warned against treating human beings as mere information-processing components, and reflected on the dangers and promise of automation. Wiener's models of the brain and of machine perception are regarded as direct precursors of later neural-network and deep-learning systems, and the McCulloch-Pitts model of the neuron as a logical threshold element, developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, supplied the cybernetic image of the brain as a computing network. Wiener, a committed pacifist after Hiroshima, later refused military research funding and broke with parts of the field over its weapons applications.[^4][^5] + +### The Macy Conferences + +The conceptual core of the field was hammered out at the Macy Conferences, a series of ten meetings funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and held in New York City from 1946 to 1953 under the chairmanship of the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch. Convened from 1947 onward under the heading "Cybernetics: Circular, Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems," a title that adopted Wiener's coinage on the suggestion of Heinz von Foerster, who edited the published proceedings, the conferences gathered an unusually broad interdisciplinary group to build a universal theory of regulation spanning living beings, machines, and minds.[^2][^6] + +The participants included Norbert Wiener, the mathematician [[John von Neumann]] (whose game theory and stored-program computer architecture shaped the era's computing), the engineer [[Claude Shannon]] (whose 1948 mathematical theory of communication defined information as a reduction of uncertainty measured against signal and noise), the anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]], and the anthropologist [[Margaret Mead]], alongside Kurt Lewin, Ralph Gerard, Heinz von Foerster, and others. Bateson and Mead carried cybernetic ideas into anthropology, psychiatry, and the study of communication, and Bateson's later work on the "ecology of mind" and the double-bind theory of schizophrenia drew directly on feedback and systems concepts.[^2][^6] + +### Diffusion into Computing, AI, and the Counterculture + +Cybernetic concepts seeded several of the defining technical projects of the later twentieth century. Shannon's information theory underlies digital communication and data compression; von Neumann's architecture underlies the modern computer; and the cybernetic conception of the brain as a network of neuron-like units fed both the symbolic artificial intelligence pursued from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and the connectionist neural networks that later dominated machine learning. A "second-order cybernetics," developed from the late 1960s by Heinz von Foerster and others at his Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, turned the field's attention to the observer as part of the observed system.[^4][^6] + +The field also entered the 1960s and 1970s American counterculture through figures who treated feedback, systems, and "whole systems" as tools for personal and ecological liberation. Gregory Bateson became a guru of the California counterculture, and his *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (1972) circulated widely; von Foerster's laboratory produced the student-made *Whole University Catalog* in 1969 in the image of [[Stewart Brand]]'s [[Whole Earth Catalog]], itself organized around "whole systems," general systems theory, and cybernetics among its first categories of tools. Brand's networks carried cybernetic and systems thinking from the communes into the personal-computer culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, as documented by [[Fred Turner]] in *From Counterculture to Cyberculture* (2006).[^6][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Wiener, Norbert. *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.* MIT Press, 1948; on the coinage of "cybernetics," feedback, and control in animals and machines. +[^2]: "Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946 to 1953," Les Presses du Réel / Claus Pias (ed.), on the ten conferences, the Macy Foundation funding, McCulloch's chairmanship, the participant list (Wiener, Bateson, von Foerster, Lewin, Mead, von Neumann, with Shannon as guest), and the effort to build a universal theory of regulation. https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=5713&menu=0 +[^3]: On Wiener's wartime anti-aircraft fire-control work with Julian Bigelow and the feedback model generalized with Arturo Rosenblueth; see Heims, Steve J. *The Cybernetics Group.* MIT Press, 1991. +[^4]: "Norbert Wiener's *Human Use of Human Beings* is more relevant than ever," *Slate,* February 2019, on the 1950 book, Wiener as founder of cybernetics, his applications to brain and machine perception as precursors of neural-network deep learning, and his warnings about automation. https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/norbert-wiener-cybernetics-human-use-artificial-intelligence.html +[^5]: McCulloch, Warren S., and Walter Pitts. "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." *Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics,* 1943, on the threshold-logic model of the neuron. +[^6]: Heims, Steve J. *The Cybernetics Group.* MIT Press, 1991; and University of Illinois Archives, "Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory," on the conference participants, second-order cybernetics, and the student-produced *Whole University Catalog* (1969). https://archives.library.illinois.edu/2016/12/06/heinz-von-foerster-and-the-bcl/ +[^7]: Turner, Fred. *From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.* University of Chicago Press, 2006; on cybernetics, systems thinking, and the Whole Earth network. And Bateson, Gregory. *Steps to an Ecology of Mind.* 1972. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Hashcash.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Hashcash.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1ba2c4ee --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Hashcash.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +category: "Scientific Theory & Technology" +tags: + - Concept + - Hashcash + - ProofOfWork + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - Bitcoin + - AdamBack +alias: + - Hashcash + - hashcash +summary: "Hashcash is the 1997 proof-of-work scheme that Adam Back devised to price email and deter spam by forcing a sender to compute a partial hash collision, and which the 2008 Bitcoin white paper cited as the model for the proof-of-work that secures the network and issues new coins." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Hashcash is a proof-of-work scheme that the British cryptographer [[Adam Back]] proposed in 1997 to deter email spam and denial-of-service attacks by attaching a small computational cost to each message. A sender must find an input whose cryptographic hash begins with a required number of zero bits, a task that takes a predictable amount of processor work to complete but that a recipient can verify in an instant. [[Satoshi Nakamoto]] cited Hashcash in the 2008 [[Bitcoin]] white paper as the basis for the proof-of-work that orders the blockchain and governs the creation of new coins.[^1][^2] + +### The Spam Problem and the Mechanism + +Back announced Hashcash on March 28, 1997, in a message to the roughly two thousand subscribers of the [[Cypherpunks|cypherpunks]] mailing list, describing it as a "partial hash collision based postage scheme," a stamp for email whose cost fell on the sender. The aim was to make the marginal cost of sending a message high enough to ruin the economics of mass spam, where a spammer sends millions of messages, while leaving an ordinary correspondent who sends a few messages effectively unburdened. The same mechanism could throttle abusive connections to a server and so blunt denial-of-service attacks.[^2][^3] + +The scheme works by partial hash inversion. The sender assembles a token containing the recipient address, a date, and a random counter, then repeatedly increments the counter and hashes the token, originally with the SHA-1 function, until the resulting digest begins with a set number of leading zero bits; Back's design proposed twenty. Because a good hash function is unpredictable, the only way to find such an input is to try enormous numbers of counters, so producing a valid token costs on average about a million hash computations for twenty zero bits, while a recipient confirms it with a single hash. Back captured the asymmetry in his announcement: "The idea of using partial hashes is that they can be made arbitrarily expensive to compute, and yet can be verified instantly." Raising the number of required zero bits raises the sender's cost exponentially while leaving verification trivial.[^2][^4] + +### Origins and the 2002 Paper + +Hashcash drew on an idea the cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor had set out in their 1992 paper "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail," which proposed charging a sender a moderately hard computation as the price of sending a message, a cost the authors called a pricing function. Back arrived at his partial-hash construction independently and turned the idea into a concrete, deployable email stamp. He circulated the design on the cypherpunks list and later set it out formally in the 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure," which described the cost function, the choice of hash, and the double-spending and minting questions that any such token scheme raises.[^3][^5] + +As an anti-spam measure Hashcash saw only limited deployment, and it was added as an optional header in a few mail systems without becoming standard. Its lasting importance came from the proof-of-work primitive at its center, the property that a token is expensive to make and cheap to check. [[Hal Finney]] built directly on Hashcash in 2004 with reusable proof-of-work, which accepted a Hashcash token and returned a signed token that could be passed from person to person, and [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money proposal envisioned participants creating money by solving computational problems, two of the lines of work that converged on cryptocurrency.[^3][^6] + +### The Bitcoin Citation + +The 2008 Bitcoin white paper cites Hashcash directly. In the section on proof-of-work it states, "To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash," and the reference list includes Back's 2002 paper. Bitcoin keeps the partial-hash mechanism almost unchanged in form, requiring that the hash of a block header fall below a target value, which is equivalent to demanding a set number of leading zero bits, but it applies the mechanism to a different problem. Where Hashcash priced a single email, Bitcoin uses the work to decide which version of a public ledger the network accepts.[^7][^1] + +In Bitcoin the miner who first finds a valid block is rewarded with newly created coins, so the proof-of-work both secures the transaction history and meters the issuance of the currency, and the white paper summarizes the consensus rule as "proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." Back has recounted that Nakamoto emailed him in August 2008 asking how Hashcash should be cited, the earliest message from Nakamoto known to be addressed to a named individual. The double hash Bitcoin computes uses SHA-256 rather than the SHA-1 of Back's original, and the network periodically adjusts the required difficulty so that blocks arrive at a roughly constant rate as total mining power changes.[^7][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, citing Adam Back's Hashcash and stating "proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf +[^2]: "The Genesis Files: Hashcash or How Adam Back Designed Bitcoin's Motor Block," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on the March 28, 1997 announcement, the "partial hash collision based postage scheme" phrasing, the SHA-1 twenty-zero-bit design, and the "arbitrarily expensive to compute, and yet can be verified instantly" quote. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/genesis-files-hashcash-or-how-adam-back-designed-bitcoins-motor-block +[^3]: Back, Adam. "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure," 2002, on the partial-hash-collision cost function, the spam and denial-of-service application, and the relation to Dwork and Naor. http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf +[^4]: "Hashcash: Proof of Work applied to emails," *Atlas21,* on the leading-zero-bit mechanism and verification asymmetry. https://atlas21.com/hashcash-proof-of-work-applied-to-emails/ +[^5]: Dwork, Cynthia, and Moni Naor. "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail," *Advances in Cryptology: CRYPTO '92,* 1992, on the pricing-function idea that preceded Hashcash. https://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp.pdf +[^6]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on Finney's reusable proof-of-work built from Hashcash and Wei Dai's b-money. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ +[^7]: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, on the line "we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash" and the proof-of-work and coin-issuance sections. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/bitcoin/ +[^8]: "Who is Adam Back? The impact of Hashcash on Bitcoin explained," *Finst,* on Nakamoto's August 2008 email to Back asking how to cite Hashcash. https://finst.com/en/learn/articles/who-is-adam-back diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Pretty Good Privacy.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Pretty Good Privacy.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fd314b83 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Pretty Good Privacy.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +category: "Scientific Theory & Technology" +tags: + - Concept + - PGP + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - Privacy + - CryptoWars + - PhilZimmermann +alias: + - PGP + - Pretty Good Privacy +summary: "Pretty Good Privacy is the email-encryption software Phil Zimmermann released for free in 1991, whose international spread triggered a three-year US criminal investigation that treated strong cryptography as a munition and that the cypherpunks made a central front of the crypto wars." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an email-encryption program written by [[Phil Zimmermann]] and released for free in June 1991, which combined public-key cryptography with symmetric encryption to let ordinary users sign and encrypt messages and files. Its release and rapid spread beyond the United States provoked a three-year federal criminal investigation that treated the software as an illegally exported munition, and PGP became a central artifact of the [[Cypherpunks]] movement and the [[Crypto Wars|crypto wars]] over the right to use strong encryption.[^1][^2] + +### Release and Design + +Zimmermann wrote in his own account that he was prompted by Senate Bill 266 of 1991, an anti-crime measure containing a non-binding sense-of-Congress provision that would have required manufacturers of secure communications equipment to build in "trap doors" so the government could read encrypted traffic. He published PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the bill's measure was dropped, framing the software as a way to "hold the line on privacy in the information age" and arguing that "the only way to hold the line on privacy in the information age is strong cryptography." He summarized the stakes in the slogan "If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."[^3] + +PGP used a hybrid scheme: it generated a random session key to encrypt the message body with a fast symmetric cipher, then encrypted that session key with the recipient's RSA public key, so anyone could send an encrypted message to a published key while only the holder of the private key could read it. It also supported digital signatures, letting a sender prove authorship and a recipient detect tampering, and it relied on a decentralized "web of trust" in which users signed one another's keys rather than depending on a central certificate authority. Because PGP incorporated the RSA algorithm, which was patented in the United States, its early distribution also drew complaints from RSA Data Security over patent use.[^1][^4] + +### The Criminal Investigation + +Within hours of its release, PGP spread over the internet and reached users outside the United States, which placed it under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the export-control regime that classified strong cryptographic software as a munition requiring a license to export. In February 1993 federal investigators visited Zimmermann, and after questions about RSA patent infringement they turned to the more serious charge of exporting a weapon without a license. The United States Customs Service opened a criminal investigation in 1993, run out of the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, into whether Zimmermann had violated the export rules when PGP traveled abroad.[^1][^2] + +Zimmermann and his supporters answered with a First Amendment argument that source code is protected speech. In 1995 the MIT Press published "PGP: Source Code and Internals," a roughly 900-page book containing the complete formatted source code of PGP 2.6.2, printed in a font designed for optical character recognition so that the code could be exported legally as a printed book, scanned abroad, and recompiled. The tactic tested whether the government would treat the printed word as a munition. The investigation closed without charges in January 1996, when United States Attorney Michael J. Yamaguchi for the Northern District of California announced that his office had declined to prosecute anyone in connection with the 1991 USENET posting of PGP.[^5][^6] + +### The Crypto Wars and the Cypherpunk Distribution + +The PGP investigation ran in parallel with the broader crypto wars of the 1990s, in which the cypherpunks fought the ITAR munitions classification and the Clinton administration's 1993 "Clipper chip" proposal for key-escrow encryption that would have given the government a copy of every key. PGP circulated through the cypherpunk network of anonymous remailers and mirror sites and became the standard tool for the movement's encrypted communications; [[Hal Finney]] was a central contributor to PGP 2.0 from 1991 and was hired by Zimmermann when the investigation closed, and [[Timothy May]]'s [[BlackNet]] thought experiment was built around PGP public keys and remailers.[^7][^8] + +The export-control regime collapsed at the end of the decade. The federal court in Bernstein v. United States ruled in 1996 that source code is speech protected by the First Amendment and that the export licensing scheme was an unconstitutional prior restraint, the Clipper proposal failed after the cryptographer Matt Blaze exposed a flaw in its escrow protocol in 1994, and in late 1999 the Clinton administration announced a broad relaxation of crypto export controls. Zimmermann later wrote that "we have finally won, at least on the export control front in the US." PGP itself passed through a series of corporate owners and was reimplemented in the open OpenPGP standard and the free GNU Privacy Guard, which carried the design forward.[^9][^3] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Phil Zimmermann: PGP, the Crypto Wars, and the Right to Encrypted Communication," *Immunity Networks,* on the 1991 release, the hybrid design, the ITAR investigation, and the resolution. https://blog.immunitynetworks.com/phil-zimmermann-pgp-encryption-privacy-crypto-wars/ +[^2]: Levy, Steven. *Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.* Viking, 2001. +[^3]: Zimmermann, Philip. "Why I Wrote PGP," on Senate Bill 266, the free electronic release, the "only outlaws will have privacy" line, and the 1999 export-policy reversal. https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html +[^4]: "Cypherpunks Write Code," *American Scientist,* on PGP, the RSA patent friction, and the crypto wars. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/cypherpunks-write-code +[^5]: Zimmermann, Philip R. *PGP: Source Code and Internals.* MIT Press, 1995, the printed source code of PGP 2.6.2. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm +[^6]: "Case Closed on Zimmermann PGP Investigation," *IEEE Cipher,* February 1996, on US Attorney Yamaguchi declining prosecution over the June 1991 USENET posting. https://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/Newsbriefs/1996/960214.zimmerman.html +[^7]: "Hal Finney, cryptographer and bitcoin pioneer, dies," *The Boston Globe,* 31 August 2014, on Finney's PGP 2.0 contributions and his hiring by Zimmermann when the investigation closed. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2014/08/31/hal-finney-cryptographer-and-bitcoin-pioneer-dies/7aFf8qJ1ixkF98m7QU76RP/story.html +[^8]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994, on PGP, remailers, and BlackNet in the cypherpunk toolkit. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt +[^9]: "Bernstein v. U.S. Dept. of Justice," Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the 1996 ruling that source code is protected speech and the licensing scheme an unconstitutional prior restraint. https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Satoshi Nakamoto.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Satoshi Nakamoto.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bf8ba5f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/SCIENTIFIC_THEORIES_&_TECHNOLOGIES/Satoshi Nakamoto.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +category: "Scientific Theory & Technology" +tags: + - Concept + - SatoshiNakamoto + - Bitcoin + - Cryptography + - Cypherpunks + - Cryptocurrency + - Pseudonym +alias: + - Satoshi + - Satoshi Nakamoto +summary: "Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous author of the 2008 Bitcoin white paper and the developer who launched the network in January 2009, mined roughly 1.1 million bitcoin that have never moved, and stopped public communication in 2011." +location: "Unknown" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the person or group who wrote the 2008 white paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," released the first [[Bitcoin]] software in January 2009, and corresponded with early developers until disappearing in 2011. The identity behind the name has never been established. Nakamoto worked entirely through email, forum posts, and code, debuting the project on a cryptography mailing list descended from the [[Cypherpunks]] milieu, and the public record of the figure consists of the white paper, the early Bitcoin source code, several hundred forum and email messages, and a body of mined coins, estimated at around 1.1 million bitcoin, that has sat untouched since 2010.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The White Paper and the Mailing-List Debut + +On 31 October 2008, from the address satoshi at vistomail.com, Nakamoto posted a message titled "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper" to the cryptography mailing list hosted at metzdowd.com, writing "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party" and linking the nine-page paper at bitcoin.org. The message listed the design's properties: double-spending prevented by a peer-to-peer network, no mint or other trusted parties, participants able to be anonymous, and new coins made from "Hashcash style proof-of-work," the scheme that [[Adam Back]] had devised in 1997. The abstract opened "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without the burdens of going through a financial institution."[^1][^4] + +The paper cited [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money and Back's Hashcash, and the design drew on the digital-cash lineage the cypherpunks had built, including [[Nick Szabo]]'s bit gold and [[Hal Finney]]'s reusable proof-of-work. Nakamoto's first private contacts predate the public post: an email to Back on 20 August 2008 flagging the Hashcash citation, and an email to Wei Dai on 22 August 2008 asking for the publication year of the b-money page so it could be cited correctly. The initial mailing-list announcement drew only a handful of replies, and Nakamoto reposted on 3 November 2008 to push the paper again.[^5][^6] + +### Launch and the Genesis Block + +Nakamoto released version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software in early January 2009 and mined the genesis block on 3 January 2009. Embedded in the coinbase of that first block is the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks," a verbatim quotation of the front-page headline of the London Times that day, which fixed the block no earlier than 3 January and was read as a comment on the bank bailouts of the 2008 financial crisis. On 9 January 2009 Nakamoto emailed Hal Finney, who became one of the first people to run the software, and on 12 January 2009 sent Finney ten coins in the first Bitcoin transaction.[^7][^8] + +Through 2009 and 2010 Nakamoto ran the project by email and on the SourceForge code repository and the bitcointalk forum, releasing software updates, fixing bugs, and handing increasing responsibility to the developer Gavin Andresen. Analysis of the early blockchain by the researcher Sergio Demian Lerner identified a distinctive nonce pattern, the "Patoshi" pattern, across the blocks mined in the first year, attributing roughly 1.1 million bitcoin across more than 22,000 addresses to a single early miner taken to be Nakamoto. None of those coins has ever been spent.[^2][^3] + +### Disappearance + +In December 2010, after the major payment processors cut off [[WikiLeaks]], some users proposed that WikiLeaks accept Bitcoin donations. Nakamoto objected on the bitcointalk forum on 11 December 2010, writing "It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us." Nakamoto's public forum activity ended that month. The last known private email, to the developer Mike Hearn on 23 April 2011, stated that Nakamoto had "moved on to other things" and that the project was "in good hands with Gavin and everyone."[^9][^10] + +By the time of that message Nakamoto had spent months transferring control of the project to Gavin Andresen, handing over the source-code repository and the network alert key that could broadcast signed warnings to every client, and had stopped signing code releases. Andresen's disclosure that he was scheduled to brief the Central Intelligence Agency through the In-Q-Tel network in 2011 is sometimes cited as a trigger for the final withdrawal, though Nakamoto left no statement of reasons. No verified communication from the Nakamoto identity has appeared since 2011, the early coins have never moved, and the cryptographic keys that would prove control of them have never been used to sign a message, which is the standard the living candidates have all declined to meet.[^10][^2] + +### The Candidates + +No claim to the Nakamoto identity has been confirmed, and the people most often named have denied it. Nick Szabo, author of the bit gold proposal, was named the most likely author of the white paper in a 2014 stylometric exercise by final-year students at Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics, who called the linguistic similarities "uncanny"; Szabo replied to the writer Dominic Frisby in 2014, "I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it." Hal Finney, who received the first transaction, was investigated by [[Andy Greenberg]] for Forbes in 2014; commissioned stylometry from Juola and Associates found Finney the closest match yet, but he was cleared by an alibi placing him at a road race when Nakamoto was sending timestamped messages. Wei Dai and Adam Back, the first two people Nakamoto is known to have emailed, have both denied being Nakamoto.[^11][^12][^6] + +In March 2014 a Newsweek cover story by Leah McGrath Goodman named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a Japanese-American engineer in Temple City, California, on the basis of his birth name and an ambiguous remark; he told the Associated Press "I did not create, invent or otherwise work on Bitcoin," and said he had taken Goodman's question to be about his earlier engineering work for defense and financial firms. The Australian computer scientist Craig Wright publicly claimed from 2015 to be Nakamoto, a claim a United Kingdom court rejected in 2024: in COPA v Wright, Mr Justice Mellor ruled that Wright was not Nakamoto and had committed forgery "on a grand scale," citing 47 forged documents including purported white-paper precursors written in a version of LaTeX unavailable in 2008. In April 2026 a New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou named Adam Back as the most likely candidate, citing his British nationality, his 1990s cypherpunk activity, the Hashcash citation, and more than a hundred matching words and phrases between his archived posts and Nakamoto's writing; Back answered "I'm not Satoshi" and said his heavy posting volume made him an easy target for the pattern-matching.[^13][^14][^15] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper," cryptography mailing list, metzdowd.com, 31 October 2008, from satoshi at vistomail.com, on the announcement and the listed design properties. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html +[^2]: "Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? What Happens If His 1.1M Bitcoins Move," *CoinGecko,* on the roughly 1.1 million untouched coins and the Patoshi pattern. https://www.coingecko.com/learn/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto +[^3]: Lerner, Sergio Demian. "The Patoshi Pattern," on the nonce analysis attributing about 1.1 million bitcoin across more than 22,000 addresses to a single early miner. https://bitslog.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/ +[^4]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, on the abstract and the citations of b-money and Hashcash. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf +[^5]: "This is the first known Satoshi Nakamoto's email," *Finbold,* on the 20 August 2008 email to Adam Back and the 22 August 2008 email to Wei Dai. https://finbold.com/this-is-the-first-known-satoshi-nakamotos-email-whats-inside/ +[^6]: "Previously Unpublished Emails of Satoshi Nakamoto Present a New Puzzle," *CoinDesk,* 26 November 2020, on the Adam Back and Wei Dai contacts and the 9 January 2009 email to Hal Finney. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/11/26/previously-unpublished-emails-of-satoshi-nakamoto-present-a-new-puzzle +[^7]: "13 Years On, the Meaning of 'Chancellor on the Brink of Second Bailout for Banks'," *CoinDesk,* on the genesis-block headline of 3 January 2009. https://www.coindesk.com/podcasts/the-breakdown-with-nlw-episode/13-years-on-the-meaning-of-chancellor-on-the-brink-of-second-bailout-for-banks +[^8]: "Hal Finney on Bitcoin: In His Own Words," *CoinDesk,* 29 August 2014, on the first transaction of ten coins on 12 January 2009. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/08/29/hal-finney-on-bitcoin-in-his-own-words +[^9]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "WikiLeaks contact info?," bitcointalk forum, 11 December 2010, on "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest." https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280 +[^10]: "Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Sent Final Email to Mike Hearn on April 23, 2011," *The Defiant,* on the "moved on to other things" message. https://thedefiant.io/news/people/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-sent-final-email-to-mike-hearn-on-april-23-2011-6735013c +[^11]: "Likely author of original Bitcoin paper? Researchers uncover linguistic evidence," *ScienceDaily,* April 2014, on the Aston University stylometric exercise naming Nick Szabo and the "uncanny" finding. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140417090547.htm +[^12]: Greenberg, Andy. "Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius," *Forbes,* 25 March 2014, on the Juola stylometry and Finney's road-race alibi. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/ +[^13]: Goodman, Leah McGrath. "The Face Behind Bitcoin," *Newsweek,* 6 March 2014, naming Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto; and "Dorian 'Satoshi' Nakamoto: I didn't invent Bitcoin," *CBS News,* on his denial to the Associated Press. https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-247957.html +[^14]: "Neutral Citation Number: [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), COPA v Wright," High Court of Justice, judgment of Mr Justice Mellor, on the finding that Wright is not Nakamoto and committed forgery "on a grand scale," 47 forgeries including LaTeX-anachronistic white-paper precursors. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/COPA-v-Wright-Judgment.pdf +[^15]: "Latest investigation into bitcoin founder ties identity to Blockstream CEO Adam Back," *CNBC,* 8 April 2026, on the John Carreyrou New York Times investigation and Back's denial; and "Adam Back Denies Being Satoshi Amid NYT Probe," *CryptoPotato,* on "I'm not Satoshi." https://cryptopotato.com/adam-back-denies-being-satoshi-amid-nyt-probe/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Singularitarianism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Singularitarianism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..afb099c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Singularitarianism.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Singularitarianism + - TechnologicalSingularity + - ArtificialIntelligence + - Transhumanism + - Superintelligence +alias: + - Singularitarianism + - Technological Singularity + - The Singularity +summary: "Singularitarianism is the belief, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and popularized by Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book and his Singularity University, that accelerating technology will soon produce a machine superintelligence and an irreversible transformation of human life." +location: "Silicon Valley, California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Singularitarianism is the belief that the continued acceleration of technology, above all artificial intelligence, will within a few decades produce a superintelligence that vastly exceeds human capability and triggers a transformation of human life so rapid and profound that the world beyond it cannot be predicted. The transformation is called the technological singularity, a term the mathematician and science-fiction writer [[Vernor Vinge]] gave the idea in 1993, and the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]] popularized it in his 2005 book *The Singularity Is Near* and in the [[Singularity University]] he cofounded in 2008. It is one strand of the broader [[Transhumanism|transhumanist]] and artificial-intelligence-risk milieu.[^1][^2] + +### Origins of the Idea + +The germ of the concept predates the name. In a 1965 paper, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," published in *Advances in Computers*, the British statistician and former Bletchley Park cryptanalyst [[I. J. Good]] defined an ultraintelligent machine as one that "can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever," and reasoned that because designing machines is itself an intellectual activity, such a machine could design still better machines: "there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind." He concluded that "the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." Vinge credited Good's intelligence explosion and an earlier remark attributed to [[John von Neumann]], reported by Stanislaw Ulam, about an "ever accelerating progress" approaching "some essential singularity," as the sources of his own formulation.[^3][^4] + +The word "singularity" carries over an analogy from physics and mathematics, where it names a point such as the center of a black hole at which the established equations break down and ordinary description fails. Applied to history, it marks a horizon beyond which existing models of the future stop working, because the appearance of intelligence greater than human renders the subsequent course of events opaque to human forecasters.[^1] + +### Vinge and the 1993 Essay + +Vinge set out the thesis in "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute on March 30 to 31, 1993, and reprinted that winter in the *Whole Earth Review*. Its opening claim is blunt: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." He added the estimate that "I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030," and defined the singularity as "a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules."[^5][^6] + +Vinge enumerated several routes by which superhuman intelligence might arrive: the development of conscious and superhumanly intelligent computers; large computer networks that "wake up" as a single superhuman entity; intimate computer-human interfaces that amplify the user toward superintelligence; and biological enhancement of human cognition. He treated the event as both plausibly imminent and, by its nature, beyond human control, arguing that once entities of greater-than-human intelligence drive progress, the cycle of self-improvement would compress to ever shorter timescales.[^5] + +### Kurzweil and the Law of Accelerating Returns + +Kurzweil, an inventor known for work in optical character recognition, text-to-speech, and music synthesis, developed the idea into a quantitative forecast. His 1999 book *The Age of Spiritual Machines* and especially *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology* (2005) argued for what he called the "law of accelerating returns," the claim that the rate of technological progress, and of evolutionary information processes more generally, grows exponentially rather than linearly. He defined the singularity as "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil projected that a computer would pass a valid Turing test and that machine intelligence would match human intelligence around 2029, and that the singularity proper, including the merger of human and machine intelligence, would arrive about 2045; he restated and updated the case in *The Singularity Is Nearer* (2024).[^7][^8] + +Kurzweil's vision fuses the intelligence forecast with the older transhumanist program: he writes of nanotechnology rebuilding the body, of radical life extension and the defeat of aging, and of eventually uploading or backing up the patterns of the human mind, themes he pursued personally through a regimen of supplements and an interest in resurrecting his late father from preserved records. In 2012 he joined [[Google]] as a director of engineering working on machine learning and language processing.[^7] + +### Institutions + +In 2008 Kurzweil cofounded Singularity University with the X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, locating it at the NASA Research Park at Ames in Mountain View, California, as a corporate-funded teaching and incubation venture aimed at "exponential technologies"; its early backers included Google, and it was later renamed Singularity Group. The Singularity Summit, an annual conference Kurzweil helped launch in 2006, was organized for several years by the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], founded by [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]].[^9][^10] + +Within that community the singularity idea split in mood. The optimistic, Kurzweilian strand anticipates the transition as broadly benevolent, while the artificial-intelligence-risk strand around Yudkowsky, [[Nick Bostrom]], whose *Superintelligence* (2014) gave the intelligence-explosion scenario its most influential academic statement, and the [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Rationalist Community|rationalist]] networks treats an uncontrolled intelligence explosion as a potential extinction event to be guarded against. The critics [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] grouped singularitarianism with transhumanism, [[Extropianism]], cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism under the acronym "TESCREAL," arguing the cluster forms a single ideology favored among the technology elite.[^11][^12] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Irving John Good Originates the Concept of the Technological Singularity," History of Information, on the singularity analogy and the lineage from Good to Vinge and Kurzweil. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2142 +[^2]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.* Viking, 2005. +[^3]: Good, I. J. "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," *Advances in Computers,* vol. 6 (1965), with the definition of the ultraintelligent machine, the "intelligence explosion," and the "last invention" conclusion. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2142 +[^4]: "Quote Origin: The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is the Last Invention That Humanity Need Ever Make," Quote Investigator, on Good's phrasing and the von Neumann remark reported by Ulam. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/04/ultraintelligent/ +[^5]: Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30 to 31, 1993. https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html +[^6]: "Vernor Vinge Predicts 'The Singularity,'" History of Information, on the 1993 presentation and the Whole Earth Review reprint. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2141 +[^7]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (1999); *The Singularity Is Near* (2005); *The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI* (2024). +[^8]: "The Singularity Is Near," publisher description and summary of Kurzweil's definition and his 2029 and 2045 forecasts. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291221/the-singularity-is-near-by-ray-kurzweil/ +[^9]: "NASA Ames Becomes Home To Newly Launched Singularity University," NASA, on the 2008 founding by Kurzweil and Diamandis at the NASA Research Park. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-ames-becomes-home-to-newly-launched-singularity-university/ +[^10]: "What is Singularity?" Singularity Group, on the founding futurists and the venture's exponential-technology mission. https://www.su.org/about-us +[^11]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014. +[^12]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism); see the *First Monday* treatment, 2023 onward. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/TESCREAL.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/TESCREAL.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..feece029 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/TESCREAL.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - TESCREAL + - Transhumanism + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - Eugenics + - ArtificialIntelligence +alias: + - TESCREALism + - TESCREAL bundle +summary: "TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence." +location: "United States" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +TESCREAL is an acronym for a bundle of seven interconnected ideologies: [[Transhumanism|transhumanism]], [[Extropianism|extropianism]], [[Singularitarianism|singularitarianism]], [[Russian Cosmism|cosmism]], [[Rationalist Community|rationalism]], [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]], and [[longtermism]]. The term was coined by the philosopher [[Émile P. Torres]] and developed with the computer scientist [[Timnit Gebru]], who argue that the seven movements form a single overlapping worldview with shared intellectual progenitors in the Anglo-American [[Eugenics|eugenics]] tradition, and that this worldview supplies the motivating vision behind the corporate race to build [[Artificial General Intelligence|artificial general intelligence]] (AGI). Torres and Gebru set out the argument in the paper "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence," published in *First Monday* in April 2024.[^1][^2] + +### The Seven Components + +The bundle's letters trace a rough chronology. Transhumanism is the umbrella commitment to using technology to transcend human biological limits; extropianism is its 1990s libertarian strand built by [[Max More]]; singularitarianism is the belief, associated with [[Vernor Vinge]] and [[Ray Kurzweil]], that accelerating technology will produce a superintelligence; cosmism, in its modern form, extends the program to the colonization of space and the creation of vast numbers of digital minds. Rationalism is the [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] and [[LessWrong]] movement organized around Bayesian reasoning and AI risk; effective altruism is the maximizing-good movement that emerged from Oxford philosophy and the rationalist community; and longtermism is the view that positively shaping the far future, above all by preventing extinction and enabling a posthuman civilization, is a paramount moral priority.[^1][^3] + +Torres and Gebru treat the bundle as a unit because its components share personnel, funding, and core texts. The same figures recur across the movements, the same organizations, including the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]], and the effective-altruism funders, support several of them at once, and a small set of authors, principally [[Nick Bostrom]], supplies the foundational arguments for more than one. Torres, a former longtermist who turned into one of the movement's sharpest critics, and Gebru, who was forced out of Google's AI ethics team in 2020 after coauthoring a paper critical of large language models and went on to found the [[Distributed AI Research Institute]] (DAIR), developed the acronym to name what they saw as a coherent ideology operating behind the AGI industry.[^2][^4] + +### The Eugenics Argument + +The central claim of the *First Monday* paper is that the bundle descends from twentieth-century eugenics and reproduces its logic. The authors trace shared progenitors including [[Francis Galton]], who coined the word "eugenics," and [[Julian Huxley]], the biologist who coined the modern usage of "transhumanism" in 1957 and served as the first president of the British Eugenics Society. They argue that the movements inherit a project of improving and ranking human cognitive capacity, and that this inheritance surfaces in the recurring appearance of racial-intelligence and [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] claims among prominent figures, including the 1996 email in which Bostrom asserted that black people are less intelligent than white people, and the research network funded by the [[Pioneer Fund]].[^1][^5] + +In the paper's account, the utopian framing of the bundle, the promise that AGI will unlock a future of astronomical value, colonizing the galaxy and supporting enormous populations of future people, functions to justify present risk and harm. If the potential future is large enough, the argument runs, then almost any present cost can be outweighed by a small reduction in the chance of extinction, a reasoning the authors say licenses the reckless development of AGI and the dismissal of its documented near-term harms. Bostrom's concept of "astronomical waste," which holds that any delay in colonizing the universe forfeits an immense number of possible lives, is the formalization they cite.[^1][^6] + +### The TESCREALists + +Torres and Gebru apply the label "TESCREALists" to the technologists and funders advancing the AGI program, among them [[Sam Altman]] of [[OpenAI]], [[Elon Musk]], the venture capitalist [[Marc Andreessen]], and the effective-altruism financier [[Sam Bankman-Fried]], alongside the movement's theorists Bostrom and Yudkowsky. The framework places the safety-focused and acceleration-focused wings of the AI industry, the [[Anthropic]] and OpenAI founders on one side and the [[Effective Accelerationism|effective accelerationists]] on the other, within the same ideological family despite their public disagreements over the pace of development.[^2][^4] + +The acronym has been adopted by critics of the AI industry and contested by figures within the bundle, who reject the grouping as a conflation of distinct positions and the eugenics charge as guilt by association. The term circulates in the debate over AI governance as a shorthand for the worldview that critics say connects [[Peter Thiel]]-funded AI-risk philanthropy, the Oxford and Bay Area longtermist institutions, and the frontier-AI companies.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday* 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 +[^2]: "The TESCREAL Bundle," Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) project page. https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/ +[^3]: Torres, Émile P. "The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares," *Truthdig,* June 2023, on the components of the bundle. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/ +[^4]: "Research Paper Exposes Dark Echoes of Eugenics in Artificial Intelligence Pursuit," on the TESCREALists and the bundle's shared personnel. https://blackgoldencommunications.com/research-paper-exposes-dark-echoes-of-eugenics-in-artificial-intelligence-pursuit/ +[^5]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on the Bostrom email. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ +[^6]: Bostrom, Nick. "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development." *Utilitas* 15, no. 3, 2003. +[^7]: "Why Silicon Valley's most powerful people are so obsessed with TESCREAL," contemporaneous press coverage of the term's reception and the disputes over it, 2023 to 2024. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Californian Ideology.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Californian Ideology.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5ac99d9d --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Californian Ideology.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - CalifornianIdeology + - SiliconValley + - Counterculture + - Libertarianism + - Neoliberalism + - TechnologicalDeterminism +alias: + - Californian Ideology +summary: "The Californian Ideology is the 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron diagnosing the fusion of San Francisco hippie counterculture with free-market neoliberalism and technological determinism in 1990s Wired-era tech culture." +location: "California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The Californian Ideology is a 1995 essay by the British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster in London, which diagnosed the worldview emerging from 1990s San Francisco Bay Area technology culture as a contradictory fusion of hippie counterculture and free-market neoliberalism held together by a faith in technological determinism. The authors described it as "a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," and as "cybernetic libertarianism," a "mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism."[^1][^2] + +### The Essay and Its Argument + +Barbrook and Cameron wrote the essay in 1994 and 1995 and first published it in *Mute* magazine, number 3, in 1995; it circulated widely on the nettime internet mailing list and appeared in a definitive version in the journal *Science as Culture* (volume 6, number 1, 1996). They argued that a loose alliance of West Coast "writers, hackers, capitalists and artists" had defined a "heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age" that "promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." The new faith reconciled the radical individualism of the 1960s with the market individualism of the 1980s by treating the spread of networked computing as an autonomous, liberating force.[^1][^2] + +Central to the critique was the claim that the ideology rested on a "nearly universal belief in technological determinism," a faith that allowed its adherents to hold incompatible visions at once: an "electronic agora" of free expression and digital democracy on one side, and an "electronic marketplace" of deregulated commerce on the other, without resolving the contradiction. The authors named *Wired* magazine, launched in 1993, as "the monthly bible of the virtual class," and noted that it reproduced the right-wing futurism of Alvin and Heidi Toffler and the libertarian politics associated with Newt Gingrich and his Progress and Freedom Foundation while presenting itself as countercultural.[^2][^3] + +### The Virtual Class, Jefferson, and the Erasure of the State + +Barbrook and Cameron borrowed the term "virtual class" to describe the "techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers and all the other communications specialists" who produced the new media, a stratum caught between market reward and the insecurity of contract employment, and so suspended between hippie autonomy and corporate discipline. The ideology, they argued, promised that digital technology would deliver a renewed "Jeffersonian democracy" in which individuals expressed themselves freely in cyberspace, a self-image the authors attacked by pointing out that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder who owned roughly two hundred people, and that the Californian utopia ignored the racial underclass on which Silicon Valley's prosperity depended.[^2][^3] + +A further charge was historical amnesia about the role of the state. The authors stressed that the very networks the ideology celebrated as products of free enterprise, above all the ARPANET that became the internet, had been built with massive public funding from the U.S. military and government, a fact the anti-statist gospel of "cybernetic libertarianism" suppressed. They located the worldview as a convergence of the New Left and the New Right, in which the countercultural rejection of the state from the left met the market fundamentalist rejection of the state from the right, producing a politics that mistook a publicly subsidized infrastructure for a triumph of laissez-faire.[^1][^2] + +### Reception and Afterlife + +The essay became one of the most cited critiques of 1990s digital culture. The critic Andrew Leonard of *Salon* called it "one of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published," while Louis Rossetto, the founder and editor of *Wired*, wrote an angry rebuttal accusing the authors of "profound ignorance of economics." Commentators have since argued that Barbrook and Cameron anticipated the later contradictions of the platform economy and the libertarian politics of the technology elite decades before they became mainstream concerns.[^1][^4] + +In the decades after publication, observers traced the fusion the essay named into the politics of the Bay Area technology industry, including the libertarian and anti-statist commitments associated with [[Peter Thiel]] and the broader transhumanist and longtermist culture, and revisited the essay on its thirtieth anniversary as a still-operative description of Silicon Valley's self-understanding. Barbrook returned to the theme in his book *Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village* (Pluto Press, 2007), extending the analysis of how Cold War American technology was reimagined as a tool of inevitable progress.[^4][^5] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. "The Californian Ideology." First published in *Mute,* number 3, 1995, and circulated on the nettime list; definitive version in *Science as Culture,* volume 6, number 1, 1996, pages 44 to 72; authors of the Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09505439609526455 +[^2]: Sterling, Bruce, summary and quotation of "The Californian Ideology" by Barbrook and Cameron (1995), on the "bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," the "free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies," the "virtual class," technological determinism, *Wired* as "the monthly bible of the virtual class," the Tofflers and Gingrich, and the Jefferson/slavery critique. https://bruces.medium.com/the-californian-ideology-by-richard-barbrook-and-andy-cameron-1995-c50014fcdbce +[^3]: Barbrook and Cameron on the "electronic agora" versus the "electronic marketplace," the "techno-intelligentsia" definition of the virtual class, and the suppressed public funding of ARPANET and hypermedia; see the *Science as Culture* text. +[^4]: "Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology Is Alive and Well," *Tech Policy Press,* on the essay's influence, Andrew Leonard's praise in *Salon,* Louis Rossetto's rebuttal charging "profound ignorance of economics," and its continuing relevance. https://www.techpolicy.press/thirty-years-on-the-californian-ideology-is-alive-and-well/ +[^5]: Barbrook, Richard. *Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.* Pluto Press, 2007. diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Sovereign Individual.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Sovereign Individual.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..95a60842 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/The Sovereign Individual.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - SovereignIndividual + - Book + - PeterThiel + - CyberLibertarianism + - AnarchoCapitalism + - Cryptocurrency + - Seasteading +alias: + - "The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State" +summary: "The Sovereign Individual is a 1997 book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson that argues digital encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction, repeatedly cited publicly by Peter Thiel as prophetic." +created: 2026-06-18 +updated: 2026-06-18 +--- + +*The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State* is a 1997 book by [[William Rees-Mogg|Lord William Rees-Mogg]] (the former editor of *[[The Times|The Times of London]]* and the father of the British politician [[Jacob Rees-Mogg]]) and [[James Dale Davidson]], the conservative financial-newsletter publisher and cofounder of the [[National Taxpayers Union]]. The book argues that the transition from the industrial age to the information age will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states, collapse the welfare state, and produce a new class of "sovereign individuals" who use encryption and electronic commerce to operate beyond territorial jurisdiction. [[Peter Thiel]] has repeatedly and publicly cited the book as prophetic, treating its thesis as the frame under which his commercial and political activities are unified.[^1][^2][^3] + +### The Thesis + +The book's central argument proceeds through a historical-periodization frame. Rees-Mogg and Davidson argue that each transition in the prevailing form of violence (pastoral, agricultural, industrial) has produced a corresponding transition in the form of political organization, and that the transition to information-age technology is now producing the conditions for the next transition. The specific mechanism is encryption: when individuals can encrypt their wealth, communications, and transactions beyond the reach of any state, the state's capacity to compel disclosure and collect taxes erodes, and the welfare state, which depends on the taxing capacity, collapses.[^1] + +The predicted successor is the sovereign individual: a technologically capable, mobile actor who chooses jurisdictions for specific functions (residency, taxation, regulation) rather than inheriting them from geography, and who holds assets in encrypted form outside the reach of any single state. The book argues that this shift will produce a "death of democracy" as the twentieth-century mass-democratic state, dependent on broad-based taxation to fund its welfare commitments, becomes fiscally non-viable. The argument was published in 1997, before the wide deployment of the commercial internet, before cryptocurrency, and before the smartphone, and the book has since been treated as prophetic on the strength of the 1997 publication date.[^1][^3] + +### The Rees-Mogg and Davidson Authorship + +William Rees-Mogg brought the establishment-media and historical-periodization register to the book; he had been editor of *The Times* from 1967 to 1981, was elevated to the peerage as [[Baron Rees-Mogg|Baron Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewitt]] in 1988, and wrote a long-running column for *[[The Mail on Sunday]]* and later *The Times*. James Dale Davidson brought the financial-newsletter and anti-tax-activist register; he had founded the National Taxpayers Union in 1969, edited the [[Strategic Investment]] newsletter, and cofounded the [[NewsMax|Newsmax]] media company. The two had previously collaborated on *[[Blood in the Streets|Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad]]* (1987) and *[[The Great Reckoning|The Great Reckoning: Protecting Yourself in the Coming Depression]]* (1993), which developed the same long-wave historical-periodization frame applied more specifically in *The Sovereign Individual*.[^1][^4] + +The Jacob Rees-Mogg family connection is the secondary channel through which the book entered British conservative politics. William's son Jacob Rees-Mogg became the leading hard-Brexit member of parliament, served as [[Lord President of the Council|Lord President of the Council]] and [[Minister for Brexit Opportunities|Minister for Brexit Opportunities]] under [[Boris Johnson|Boris Johnson's]] government, and has repeatedly cited his father's work in his own public writing and speaking.[^4] + +### The Thiel Adoption + +Peter Thiel has cited *The Sovereign Individual* as the book he treats as most prophetic, and he has done so repeatedly across interviews, in his own writing, and in the 2014 book *[[Zero to One]]* coauthored with [[Blake Masters]]. Thiel's endorsement is documented in a 2014 *[[Fortune (magazine)|Fortune]]* interview, in *Zero to One* itself, and in multiple subsequent public statements. The book supplies the ideological frame under which Thiel's commercial investments in cryptocurrency, offshore financial structures, the [[Seasteading Institute]] (the project to build sovereign ocean-surface communities), and the broader [[Founders Fund]] thesis are unified: each is infrastructure for the transition the book predicts.[^2][^5] + +The book's thesis is continuous with the [[Neoreaction]] argument that [[Curtis Yarvin]] develops through his *[[Unqualified Reservations]]* blog from 2007 and with the [[Dark Enlightenment]] synthesis of [[Nick Land]]. Yarvin cites *The Sovereign Individual* directly, and the [[Neocameralism]] proposal (the joint-stock sovereign corporation as the successor to the democratic state) applies the book's thesis about the obsolescence of territorial jurisdiction. The line of descent runs from the 1997 Rees-Mogg/Davidson text through Yarvin's procedural-reorganization argument to the operational work of the [[Thiel Influence Network|Thiel network]].[^2][^6] + +### The Predictions and Their Subsequent Evaluation + +The book's predictions have been the subject of recurring evaluation. The accurate predictions include the rise of cryptocurrency (the book describes encrypted digital currencies before [[bitcoin]] by more than a decade), the geographic decoupling of work and residency (remote work), tax competition between jurisdictions (the [[Panama Papers|Panama Papers]] and the broader offshore-structuring industry), and the declining capacity of governments to control information flows (the [[WikiLeaks|WikiLeaks]] and [[Edward Snowden|Snowden]] disclosures).[^1][^3] + +The predictions that have not yet materialized, or have materialized only partially, include the actual collapse of the welfare state (which has been politically defended rather than fiscally abandoned in most developed economies) and the emergence of the sovereign individual as the dominant political-economic unit (which remains a minority practice confined to the high-net-worth and crypto-native populations). The book's most contentious claim, the "death of democracy," is the one Thiel himself has most directly embraced; the [[Cato Unbound]] 2009 essay "The Education of a Libertarian," in which Thiel wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, is the direct restatement of the book's thesis in first-person form.[^2][^7] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: Rees-Mogg, William, and James Dale Davidson. *The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.* Simon and Schuster, 1997. Full text available at https://www.lopp.net/pdf/The%20Sovereign%20Individual.pdf +[^2]: Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. *Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.* Crown Business, 2014. +[^3]: Owens, Tom. "The Sovereign Individual: A Review." *Substack,* 2022. https://tomowens.substack.com/p/the-sovereign-individual-a-review +[^4]: For William Rees-Mogg's career and the Jacob Rees-Mogg family connection, see *The Times* obituary coverage (2012) and the biographical record of the Rees-Mogg family. +[^5]: Thiel, Peter. Interview, *Fortune,* 2014, on the books he treats as prophetic. +[^6]: Yarvin, Curtis (Moldbug). "Unqualified Reservations" (blog), 2007 onward. See also Thiel, Peter. "The Education of a Libertarian." *Cato Unbound,* 2009. https://www.cato.org/cato-unbound/education-libertarian/ +[^7]: "The Network State Paradox." *SSRN,* 2024. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/6376478.pdf?abstractid=6376478 diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Transhumanism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Transhumanism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..06c59137 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Transhumanism.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Transhumanism + - LifeExtension + - Cryonics + - ArtificialIntelligence + - HumanEnhancement + - Posthumanism +alias: + - Transhumanism + - Transhumanist + - H+ +summary: "Transhumanism is the movement to use technology to transcend the biological limits of the human condition, named in its modern sense by Julian Huxley in 1957 and organized academically by the World Transhumanist Association that Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded in 1998." +location: "United Kingdom; California" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that holds that human beings can and should use science and technology to overcome the fundamental limits of their biology, including disease, aging, death, and the bounds of human cognition. Its program spans radical life extension, cognitive and physical enhancement, genetic engineering, mind uploading, cryonics, and the eventual emergence of a posthuman condition. The term in its modern sense comes from the biologist [[Julian Huxley]] in 1957, and the movement acquired an organizational form with the World Transhumanist Association founded by [[Nick Bostrom]] and [[David Pearce]] in 1998. It is the umbrella under which the libertarian [[Extropianism|extropian]] current and the academic and technoprogressive wings both fall.[^1][^2] + +### The Term and Its Precursors + +Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and the first director-general of UNESCO, used the word in his 1957 essay collection *New Bottles for New Wine*, writing that "the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself, not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity," and proposing, "We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve." Bostrom's own account of the movement's history traces an older lineage of scientific speculation about remaking the human, in particular the biologist J. B. S. Haldane's lecture *Daedalus; or, Science and the Future* (1923), which imagined ectogenesis and genetic improvement, and the physicist J. D. Bernal's *The World, the Flesh and the Devil* (1929), which envisaged bionic implants and the colonization of space.[^3][^4] + +The deeper roots reach to Enlightenment confidence in progress and perfectibility, and beyond that to the ancient and perennial human wish to escape mortality, but transhumanists distinguish their position by its insistence that the relevant transformation is to be achieved through applied technology rather than through politics, ethics, or the supernatural. The contemporary movement adopted the abbreviation "H+" or "h+," standing for "humanity plus," as shorthand for the enhanced future condition it seeks.[^3] + +### Core Technologies and Projects + +The cluster of technologies central to transhumanist hope took shape across the second half of the twentieth century. Robert Ettinger's *The Prospect of Immortality* (1962) launched the practice of cryonics, the freezing of the legally dead in the expectation of future revival, and his *Man into Superman* (1972) generalized the idea to technological enhancement of the living. The futurist [[FM-2030]], born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, taught "new concepts of the human" at the [[New School for Social Research]] in the 1960s, organized the optimistic "UpWingers," and in *Are You a Transhuman?* (1989) gave the term "transhuman" wide currency, describing a transitional being on the way to a posthuman future. The engineer [[Eric Drexler]]'s *Engines of Creation* (1986) brought molecular nanotechnology into the program, and the prospect of whole-brain emulation, or mind uploading, supplied a technological route to the old dream of surviving the death of the body.[^4][^5] + +These threads converged with the rise of computing and artificial intelligence into a coherent agenda by the 1980s and 1990s: defeat aging through biotechnology and nanomedicine, raise intelligence through drugs, implants, and genetic selection, preserve the dying through cryonic suspension at facilities such as the [[Alcor Life Extension Foundation]], and ultimately transfer or back up the patterns of the mind onto more durable substrates. The movement overlaps heavily with the milieu of the technological singularity and with the artificial-intelligence community, and counts the futurist [[Ray Kurzweil]] among its best-known proponents.[^2][^4] + +### The Libertarian and Academic Wings + +The first sustained organization of modern transhumanism came from its libertarian wing. The philosopher [[Max More]] coined the term "extropy" in 1988 and built the [[Extropy Institute]] around an anarcho-capitalist and individualist creed of self-overcoming, whose 1990s mailing list gathered many of the figures later prominent in the AI-risk, [[Rationalist Community|rationalist]], and cypherpunk worlds. A distinct, more academic and politically heterogeneous tendency emerged at the end of the decade: in early 1998 Bostrom, then a young philosopher, and Pearce, author of the online manifesto *The Hedonistic Imperative*, founded the World Transhumanist Association, later renamed Humanity+, to provide an organizational basis open to transhumanists across the political spectrum. Its two founding documents were the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ.[^1][^6] + +A further fork ran through the academic wing itself. The bioethicist [[James Hughes]], in *Citizen Cyborg* (2004), articulated a "democratic transhumanism" or "technoprogressivism" that paired enhancement technologies with social democracy, equal access, and public regulation, in deliberate contrast to the extropians' free-market politics. Bostrom moved the intellectual center toward the academy by founding the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] at the University of Oxford in 2005 and turning increasingly to existential risk and to [[Longtermism|longtermism]], the view that the welfare of vast numbers of future people should weigh heavily in present decisions.[^6][^7] + +### Reception and Criticism + +Transhumanism has drawn sustained criticism from across the political and intellectual map. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, writing in *Foreign Policy* in 2004, called it "the world's most dangerous idea," arguing that the project of re-engineering human nature threatens the basis of equal human dignity, and bioconservative critics such as Leon Kass and Michael Sandel have objected to the drive to abolish suffering, aging, and the given character of human life. From a different direction, the scholars [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] argued that transhumanism anchors a bundle of overlapping ideologies they labeled "TESCREAL," for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, which they contend has roots in twentieth-century eugenics and now exerts outsized influence over the priorities of the technology industry.[^8][^9] + +The movement has acquired a notable patronage among technology billionaires, whose funding of longevity research, cryonics, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence draws directly on transhumanist aims; the [[Peter Thiel]] network's investments in anti-aging biotechnology and Thiel's own public embrace of life extension and cryonic preservation are frequently cited examples. The internal divide between those who seek to build superintelligence and those in the [[Effective Altruism]] and AI-risk camp who fear it surfaced in Thiel's 2025 [[Antichrist]] lectures, in which he accused [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] and Bostrom of turning from transhumanism toward a precautionary opposition to technology.[^7][^10] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Transhumanism," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on the definition, Julian Huxley's coinage, Max More and the Extropy Institute, and the 1998 founding of the World Transhumanist Association by Bostrom and Pearce. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism +[^2]: Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought," *Journal of Evolution and Technology,* 2005. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/ +[^3]: Huxley, Julian. *New Bottles for New Wine.* Chatto and Windus, 1957, on the coinage of "transhumanism"; with Haldane's *Daedalus; or, Science and the Future* (1923) and Bernal's *The World, the Flesh and the Devil* (1929) as cited in Bostrom's history. +[^4]: Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought," on Ettinger, FM-2030, Drexler, and the technologies of enhancement. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/ +[^5]: Esfandiary, F. M. (FM-2030). *Are You a Transhuman?* Warner Books, 1989; and Ettinger, Robert. *The Prospect of Immortality* (1962) and *Man into Superman* (1972). +[^6]: Pearce, David. *The Hedonistic Imperative* (1995); World Transhumanist Association, Transhumanist Declaration and Transhumanist FAQ (1998 to 1999). +[^7]: Hughes, James. *Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.* Westview Press, 2004; on the Future of Humanity Institute, Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (2014), and longtermism. +[^8]: Fukuyama, Francis. "Transhumanism," *Foreign Policy,* September to October 2004, on "the world's most dangerous idea." https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/23/transhumanism/ +[^9]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle and its claimed eugenic roots; see the *First Monday* treatment, 2023 onward, and Torres's writing in *Truthdig.* +[^10]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025, on Thiel's charge that Yudkowsky and Bostrom abandoned transhumanism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ diff --git a/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Utilitarianism.md b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Utilitarianism.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f2afc251 --- /dev/null +++ b/50 - CONCEPTS & TECHNOLOGY/Utilitarianism.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +category: "Ideology" +tags: + - Concept + - Utilitarianism + - EffectiveAltruism + - Longtermism + - MoralPhilosophy + - Consequentialism +alias: + - Utilitarianism + - Consequentialism +summary: "Utilitarianism is the moral theory, running from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill through Henry Sidgwick to Peter Singer, that the right act maximizes aggregate welfare, and its quantifying logic became the operating premise of effective altruism and longtermism." +location: "England" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Utilitarianism is the moral theory holding that the rightness of an act depends only on its consequences for the welfare of all affected, and that the right act is the one producing the greatest balance of good over bad, counted impartially across everyone. It descends from the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 to 1873) through the Cambridge philosopher [[Henry Sidgwick]] (1838 to 1900) and into the late-twentieth-century work of [[Peter Singer]] and [[Derek Parfit]]. Its maximizing, quantifying structure supplied the reasoning method of [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism|longtermism]].[^1][^2] + +### Bentham, Mill, and the Felicific Calculus + +Jeremy Bentham set out the doctrine in *An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation* (1789), grounding morality on the "principle of utility," that an action is approved as it tends to increase the happiness of the party affected, and famously took as the standard "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He proposed the felicific or hedonic calculus, a procedure for weighing a prospective pleasure or pain by its intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent, the last being the number of persons affected. The calculus made moral evaluation a matter of summation and treated each person's happiness as counting equally, a commitment Bentham expressed in the maxim "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one."[^3] + +John Stuart Mill, raised by his father and Bentham on the doctrine, defended and revised it in *Utilitarianism*, first published as three articles in *Fraser's Magazine* in 1861 and as a book in 1863. Mill held that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they produce its reverse, but argued against Bentham that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, ranking the "higher" intellectual and moral pleasures above bodily ones and writing that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. This qualitative move answered the charge that utilitarianism was a doctrine fit only for swine while keeping the maximizing structure intact.[^4] + +### Sidgwick and the Point of View of the Universe + +Henry Sidgwick gave utilitarianism its most rigorous formulation in *The Methods of Ethics* (1874), which Parfit judged to contain more true and important claims than any other work in the history of ethics. Sidgwick derived the impartial core of the theory from what he called the "point of view of the universe," the self-evident principle that the good of any one person is, from that standpoint, no more important than the good of any other, so that a rational agent should aim at the universal good. He distinguished the "methods of ethics," egoism, intuitionism, and utilitarianism, and conceded a "dualism of practical reason," an unresolved standoff between the rational claims of self-interest and those of universal benevolence.[^5][^1] + +Sidgwick's impartial standpoint is the ancestor of what Thomas Nagel later called "the view from nowhere," the attempt to evaluate the world from no particular person's perspective. Sidgwick was also a founder and first president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and his teaching at Cambridge carried the utilitarian tradition into the twentieth century, where it was revived in analytic form by Parfit's *Reasons and Persons* (1984) and by Singer, who with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek wrote a 2014 book defending Sidgwick's position.[^5][^6] + +### Singer and the Path into Effective Altruism + +Peter Singer carried the impartial maximizing logic into applied ethics, arguing in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) that if a person can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance they are obligated to do it, and that distance and nationality make no difference to the obligation. For decades he defended a preference utilitarianism, on which good is the satisfaction of the preferences of all affected, before returning in 2014 to the hedonistic utilitarianism of Sidgwick. The same impartial weighing of all interests underlay his case in *Animal Liberation* (1975) that the suffering of animals counts equally with that of humans.[^7][^2] + +Effective altruism took utilitarianism's structure as a method: rank causes by the expected good per dollar, count distant and future beneficiaries equally with near ones, and direct resources to wherever the marginal return in welfare is highest. [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]] built [[Giving What We Can]] and the cause-prioritization apparatus on this quantitative footing, and [[Nick Bostrom]] and Ord extended the impartial counting of persons across time so that the welfare of vast future populations dominates the calculation, the premise of longtermism. The theory's "ends justify the means" tendency drew renewed scrutiny after [[Sam Bankman-Fried]], who had embraced utilitarian reasoning, was convicted of fraud in 2023, and critics including Émile P. Torres traced the movement's quantifying impulse, alongside the [[Human Biodiversity|hereditarian]] currents around its Oxford institutions, back to nineteenth-century roots.[^2][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Consequentialism" and "The History of Utilitarianism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on the maximizing-impartial structure and the Bentham-Mill-Sidgwick lineage. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/ +[^2]: de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. *Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction.* Oxford University Press, 2017. +[^3]: Bentham, Jeremy. *An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.* 1789, on the principle of utility, the greatest-happiness standard, and the felicific calculus. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/bentham1780.pdf +[^4]: Mill, John Stuart. *Utilitarianism.* 1863 (first serialized in *Fraser's Magazine,* 1861), on the proportionality principle and higher and lower pleasures. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mill1863.pdf +[^5]: Sidgwick, Henry. *The Methods of Ethics.* 1874, on the point of view of the universe and the dualism of practical reason; "Henry Sidgwick," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Britannica, on the Knightbridge professorship and the Society for Psychical Research. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sidgwick/ +[^6]: Nagel, Thomas. *The View from Nowhere.* Oxford University Press, 1986, on the objective impartial standpoint and its tension with personal commitments. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-view-from-nowhere-9780195056440 +[^7]: Singer, Peter. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." *Philosophy and Public Affairs,* vol. 1, no. 3, 1972, on the central principle and impartiality across distance. +[^8]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023, on the consequentialist method underlying the movement and its critics. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/358 El Brillo Way.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/358 El Brillo Way.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..df6a1891 --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/358 El Brillo Way.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: [Place, JeffreyEpstein, PalmBeach, Florida, Property, SexTrafficking, MichaelReiter, NonProsecutionAgreement] +summary: "Waterfront Palm Beach mansion owned by Jeffrey Epstein where the 2005 Palm Beach Police Department investigation began after a parent reported that her teenage stepdaughter had been molested there." +location: Palm Beach, Florida +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The house at 358 El Brillo Way was a waterfront mansion in the Town of Palm Beach, Florida, owned by [[Jeffrey Epstein]] from 1990 until his 2019 death. The 2005 investigation by the [[Palm Beach Police Department]] into conduct at the house produced the first criminal case against Epstein and identified dozens of teenage girls who said they had been abused there.[^1] + +### Acquisition and the House + +Epstein purchased 358 El Brillo Way in 1990 for about 2.5 million dollars.[^2] The roughly 14,000-square-foot, six-bedroom house sat on about eight-tenths of an acre fronting the Intracoastal Waterway and had been designed by the Palm Beach architect [[John Volk]].[^2] The previous long-term owner had been Owen Ray Skelton, a founder and chief engineer of Chrysler, who held the property until his death in 1969.[^3] + +The house became Epstein's Florida residence, and he traveled frequently between it, the [[9 East 71st Street]] townhouse in Manhattan, his New Mexico ranch and his U.S. Virgin Islands island.[^1] Staff at the Palm Beach house arranged appointments described as massages, and visitors were directed to an upstairs room set up with a massage table.[^4] + +The waterfront location placed the house a short distance from other prominent Palm Beach estates, and Epstein maintained it as a household with domestic and scheduling staff whose later statements and records became evidence in the police investigation.[^4] + +### The 2005 Palm Beach Police Investigation + +In March 2005 a woman reported to the Palm Beach Police Department that her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by a wealthy man who lived on El Brillo Way, and detectives quickly identified the man as Epstein.[^4] From that account, investigators learned that Epstein had been paying girls from a West Palm Beach high school for sessions described as massages, and that the conduct extended to a network of dozens of girls.[^4] Police Chief [[Michael Reiter]] supervised the inquiry, and lead detective [[Joseph Recarey]] conducted the interviews over a probe that ran for roughly a year.[^4] + +Detectives documented a recruitment pyramid in which girls were paid roughly 200 to 300 dollars per visit and given money or incentives to bring other girls, who in turn recruited still more, building outward from a small number of initial contacts.[^4] Investigators interviewed two dozen girls and their parents on camera, obtained phone records, and conducted surveillance, and they later said Epstein's own representatives surveilled the police and pulled investigators' garbage during the case.[^4] The girls' accounts described being taken to the upstairs massage room at the house and paid in cash.[^4] + +Reiter said the volume and ages of the victims were unlike anything in his experience and that he came to believe Epstein's earlier offers of donations to the department had been attempts to probe whether police were investigating him.[^5] When the state prosecution narrowed, Reiter wrote to the State Attorney objecting to the handling of the case and ultimately referred the matter to the FBI.[^5] + +### The Case and the Non-Prosecution Agreement + +State Attorney [[Barry Krischer]] presented the case to a Palm Beach County grand jury, and prosecutors called a single victim while emphasizing material that cast doubt on her credibility; the grand jury returned one count of solicitation of prostitution in 2006.[^4] Recarey and Reiter objected that the charge did not reflect the conduct against minors that detectives had documented, and the police chief's referral moved the matter into federal jurisdiction.[^5] + +Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida, led by U.S. Attorney [[Alexander Acosta]], prepared a sex-trafficking case but in 2007 negotiated a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein's lawyers.[^6] Under the 2008 resolution Epstein pleaded guilty in state court to two prostitution-related charges, registered as a sex offender, and served about thirteen months in the Palm Beach County stockade with extensive work-release privileges, while the agreement also conferred immunity on potential co-conspirators and was not disclosed to the victims.[^6] A federal judge later ruled that the failure to notify the victims violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act.[^6] + +The Palm Beach investigation and the non-prosecution agreement became the factual basis for the 2018 Miami Herald series that renewed national attention on Epstein, leading to his July 2019 federal indictment in New York on sex-trafficking charges.[^6] + +### The 2021 Sale and Demolition + +After Epstein's death the Palm Beach house was listed by his estate, initially around 22 million dollars, and in March 2021 it sold for 18.5 million dollars to the developer [[Todd Michael Glaser]].[^2] The proceeds, like those of the New York townhouse sale, went to the estate and its victim-compensation fund.[^7] + +Glaser filed a notice of commencement for total demolition, and razing of the house began in April 2021.[^7] He changed the address of the cleared parcel to 360 El Brillo Way, citing the notoriety attached to the original number, and the lot was redeveloped.[^2] A new estate built on the site was later marketed at a figure far above the demolished house's sale price.[^2] + +The demolition removed the physical site where the 2005 investigation had begun, and the redevelopment proceeded as the estate continued to resolve civil claims arising from conduct that victims said had occurred at the house.[^7] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: For Epstein's 1990 acquisition of the Palm Beach house and its place among his residences through the 2019 timeline, see the contemporaneous press (*Palm Beach Daily News*, Associated Press, *Miami Herald*). +[^2]: "EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein house sold for $18.5M in Palm Beach," Darrell Hofheinz, *Palm Beach Daily News,* via Corcoran, and "Notorious Palm Beach mansion Jeffrey Epstein bought for $2.5M," *Palm Beach Post / Yahoo,* on the 1990 purchase for about 2.5 million dollars, the roughly 14,000-square-foot six-bedroom John Volk house, the March 2021 sale for 18.5 million dollars to Todd Michael Glaser, and the renumbering to 360 El Brillo Way. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/notorious-palm-beach-mansion-jeffrey-202519748.html +[^3]: For Owen Ray Skelton, a founder and chief engineer of Chrysler, as the prior owner of the house until his death in Palm Beach in 1969, see the Palm Beach property history summarized in contemporaneous Palm Beach Daily News reporting. https://www.corcoran.com/nyc/press-mention/display/30508 +[^4]: "The Palm Beach cop who Jeffrey Epstein couldn't stop," *Union-Bulletin / Associated Press,* on the March 2005 report by the stepmother of a fourteen-year-old, the identification of Epstein, the West Palm Beach high-school victims, Chief Michael Reiter and detective Joseph Recarey, the recruitment pyramid paying 200 to 300 dollars per visit, the on-camera interviews of two dozen girls, the surveillance, and the 2006 grand jury's single solicitation count. https://www.union-bulletin.com/news/national/the-palm-beach-cop-who-jeffrey-epstein-couldn-t-stop/article_699648e0-ce21-53fe-aaad-6e797deaeebf.html +[^5]: "Ex-Florida police chief: Epstein case 'the worst failure of the criminal justice system' in modern times," *NBC News,* 2019, on Michael Reiter's account of the donations probe, his objections to the State Attorney's handling, and his referral of the case to the FBI. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-florida-police-chief-epstein-case-worst-failure-criminal-justice-n1057226 +[^6]: Julie K. Brown, "Perversion of Justice," *Miami Herald,* 2018, on the 2007 to 2008 non-prosecution agreement negotiated under U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, the state guilty plea and roughly thirteen-month sentence with work release, the immunity for co-conspirators, the non-disclosure to victims later found to violate the Crime Victims' Rights Act, and the 2019 federal indictment. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html +[^7]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Palm Beach mansion is being demolished," *The Real Deal,* 2021, on Todd Michael Glaser's notice of commencement, the April 2021 start of demolition, and the disposition of sale proceeds. https://therealdeal.com/miami/2021/04/20/jeffrey-epsteins-palm-beach-mansion-is-being-demolished/ diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/9 East 71st Street.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/9 East 71st Street.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3235e311 --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/9 East 71st Street.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: [Place, JeffreyEpstein, Manhattan, Property, SexTrafficking, LesWexner, UpperEastSide, MapleInc] +summary: "Seven-story limestone townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side that served as Jeffrey Epstein's primary New York residence and the site of conduct detailed in the federal sex-trafficking case against him." +location: New York, New York +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +The townhouse at 9 East 71st Street stands on the north side of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Built as the Herbert N. Straus mansion in the early 1930s, the roughly 21,000-square-foot limestone residence ranked among the largest single-family houses in New York City and became the primary New York base of [[Jeffrey Epstein]] from the early 1990s until his 2019 arrest.[^1] + +### The Straus Mansion + +Herbert Nathan Straus, an heir to the R. H. Macy & Co. department-store fortune and a son of [[Isidor Straus]] and Ida Straus, who died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, bought the lot in 1928 and commissioned the Philadelphia architect [[Horace Trumbauer]] to design a French neoclassical mansion.[^2] Construction began at the end of the 1920s, and Straus imported eighteenth-century European rooms and fixtures for the interior.[^2] The stock-market crash of October 1929 disrupted the project, and Straus halted work in 1931 with the house roughly ninety percent complete after spending about 600,000 dollars.[^2] + +Straus remained at his Park Avenue apartment and died in 1933 without ever living in the unfinished mansion.[^2] His heirs left the structure vacant for more than a decade while property-tax obligations accumulated.[^2] The house later passed through institutional and residential uses before returning to private ownership, and by the late 1980s the seven-story building was measured at about 21,000 square feet on a lot fifty feet wide.[^1] + +The exterior was finished in limestone in the French neoclassical manner, set off by a fifteen-foot oak entrance door and tall arched windows, and the residence stood out of scale with its four- and five-story neighbors.[^3] A 2003 Vanity Fair profile of the interior described the residence as among the city's grandest townhouses and recorded unusual furnishings, including framed prosthetic eyeballs that the account said had been manufactured in England for injured soldiers and a life-size sculpture of a naked warrior.[^3] + +### Wexner Purchase and Transfer to Epstein + +[[Leslie Wexner]], the founder of The Limited and [[L Brands]], purchased the townhouse in 1989 for about 13.2 million dollars, and control of the property then moved through a chain of corporate entities during the 1990s with Epstein listed in various officer or trustee roles.[^4] Epstein, who held a sweeping power of attorney over Wexner's finances granted in 1991, used the house as his Manhattan residence while title remained with Wexner-linked entities.[^4] + +In 2011 the mansion was conveyed to [[Maple Inc.]], an Epstein-linked U.S. Virgin Islands entity, for zero dollars in recorded consideration, with Epstein signing the transaction for both the seller and the buyer.[^4] Reporting at the time valued the property in the tens of millions of dollars, and the terms were never fully explained publicly.[^4] An FBI internal memo released in 2026 stated that Epstein "controlled all of Wexner's personal finances with virtually no oversight" and described his sale to himself of a New York home that had belonged to Wexner at a discounted price; the financial mechanics of that transfer are detailed on the Leslie Wexner page.[^5] + +Epstein listed Manhattan as his residence in legal filings, and the townhouse functioned as the hub of his New York operations, with staff, a large household and the art and furnishings later catalogued during the federal search.[^1] + +### Interior Accounts and Surveillance + +Court testimony, photographs entered as evidence and journalistic accounts described an interior filled with framed photographs of women and girls, including images displayed in the stairwells and private rooms.[^6] Witnesses and reporters described a chessboard whose pieces were dressed to resemble Epstein's staff, a life-size hanging female doll, a mural depicting a prison yard and a painting that appeared to depict Bill Clinton.[^3] + +Investigators who searched the house in 2019 reported finding hidden cameras positioned to monitor bedrooms and bathrooms, and photographs of partially nude and apparently underage females were recovered from multiple rooms.[^6] Compact discs and hard drives containing images were found in plastic bins and drawers distributed throughout the residence.[^7] + +Several women who later gave testimony in civil suits and in the prosecution of [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] described being brought to the townhouse as minors or young adults and directed to upstairs massage rooms, accounts that form part of the body of allegations against Epstein and his associates rather than adjudicated findings as to this address.[^6] Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 of sex-trafficking and conspiracy charges arising from conduct that prosecutors said occurred at Epstein's residences, including the New York townhouse.[^6] + +### The July 2019 Federal Search + +Federal agents executed a search warrant at 9 East 71st Street on the evening of July 6, 2019, the day Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport, and continued into July 7.[^7] An FBI team from a child-exploitation and human-trafficking task force forced entry when no one answered, and agents located a locked safe in a fifth-floor dressing area, which they opened with a saw; the supervising agent later testified that "we brought a saw."[^7] + +Prosecutors said the safe held about 70,000 dollars in cash, dozens of loose diamonds, compact discs, hard drives and an expired foreign passport.[^8] The passport had been issued by Austria in 1982, was valid until 1987 and bore a photograph of Epstein under the name Marius Robert Fortelni, listing an occupation of "manager" and a residence in Dammam, Saudi Arabia; its pages carried entry stamps for France, England and Saudi Arabia from the early 1980s.[^9] Prosecutors cited the diamonds, the cash and the false passport at Epstein's bail hearing as evidence that he had the means and intent to flee, and Judge Richard Berman denied bail.[^8] + +Epstein's defense lawyers said the passport had been given to him by a friend decades earlier for personal protection during travel, asserting that some Jewish Americans had been advised to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally during a period of hijacking risk, and that Epstein never used it to clear immigration.[^9] Epstein was found dead in his federal jail cell on August 10, 2019, and the ruling was suicide.[^1] + +### Post-Death Sale + +After Epstein's death the townhouse was placed on the market by his estate, listed in 2020 at 88 million dollars, a price that was cut by 23 million dollars to 65 million dollars in January 2021.[^10] In March 2021 the mansion sold for 51 million dollars to Michael Daffey, a former [[Goldman Sachs]] executive who had managed hedge-fund clients for the bank and was retiring from its global-markets division.[^10] + +A spokesman said Daffey financed the purchase with cash and a bridge loan, and the proceeds went to Epstein's estate, which had established a fund to compensate his alleged victims.[^10] Coverage placed the building at about 19,000 to 28,000 square feet across seven stories with roughly forty rooms, the wide variance reflecting differing measurements of the much-altered house over the decades.[^10] + +The sale closed the chain of ownership that ran from the Straus heirs through the mid-century institutional uses to Wexner, to the Epstein-controlled Maple Inc. entity, and finally to a private buyer who paid roughly 1,800 dollars per square foot.[^10] The fund established from the estate's assets, including the proceeds of this and the Palm Beach sale, processed claims from women who said they had been abused at Epstein's properties.[^10] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: For the townhouse as Epstein's primary New York residence, the approximately 21,000-square-foot late-1980s measurement, and the timeline through his July 2019 arrest and August 10, 2019 death, see the contemporaneous press (Associated Press, *New York Times,* CNBC). +[^2]: "The 1933 Herbert Straus Mansion, No. 9 East 71st Street," *Daytonian in Manhattan,* on Herbert N. Straus as a Macy's heir and son of Isidor and Ida Straus, his 1928 purchase of the lot, the commission to Horace Trumbauer, the imported European rooms, the 1929 crash, the 1931 halt at roughly ninety percent completion after about 600,000 dollars, and his 1933 death without occupying the house. http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-1933-herbert-straus-mansion-no-9.html +[^3]: "A Scandal in Stone: The Infamous Epstein Townhouse," *East Side Feed,* summarizing the 2003 Vanity Fair profile of the interior (the fifteen-foot oak door, arched windows, framed prosthetic eyeballs and naked-warrior sculpture) and the artwork later observed during the FBI search. https://eastsidefeed.com/real-estate/a-scandal-in-stone-the-infamous-epstein-townhouse/ +[^4]: "What the Records Show: The Townhouses on East 71st Street," summarizing NYC ACRIS deed records and 2019 reporting on Leslie Wexner's 1989 purchase for about 13.2 million dollars and the 2011 zero-dollar transfer to Maple Inc. signed by Epstein for both sides. https://www.habituallychic.luxury/2020/07/a-look-inside-9-east-71st-street/ +[^5]: "FBI memos, bank record, odd emails mention Wexner in new Epstein files," *AOL,* 2026, quoting the FBI memo that Epstein "controlled all of Wexner's personal finances with virtually no oversight" and describing his discounted sale to himself of a Wexner home and aircraft. https://www.aol.com/articles/les-wexner-appears-latest-epstein-171239980.html +[^6]: Trial coverage of United States v. Ghislaine Maxwell (S.D.N.Y. 2021), on the December 2021 conviction and on victim testimony describing the New York townhouse, the displayed photographs and the upstairs massage rooms; abuse described at this address is testimony and allegation. https://www.foxnews.com/us/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-epstein-nude-photos-evidence-tape +[^7]: "'We brought a saw': FBI found diamonds, cash, passports, CDs and hard drives after cracking open safe in 2019 raid on Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse," *inkl,* on the July 6 to 7, 2019 search, the fifth-floor safe, the sawing open, the agent's testimony, and the CDs and hard drives found throughout the house. https://www.inkl.com/news/we-brought-a-saw-fbi-found-diamonds-cash-passports-cds-and-hard-drives-after-cracking-open-safe-in-2019-raid-on-epstein-s-upper-east-side-townhouse +[^8]: "Epstein's safe had 'piles of cash' and a fake passport, prosecutors say," *Seattle Times / Associated Press,* 2019, on the roughly 70,000 dollars in cash, the diamonds, the expired foreign passport cited at the bail hearing, and Judge Richard Berman's denial of bail. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/epsteins-safe-had-piles-of-cash-and-a-fake-passport-prosecutors-ssay/ +[^9]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Fake Foreign Passport Was Used in Saudi Arabia and Other Countries," *The Daily Beast,* 2019, on the Austrian passport issued in 1982 and valid until 1987 in the name Marius Robert Fortelni, the Dammam, Saudi Arabia residence, the early-1980s entry stamps for France, England and Saudi Arabia, and the defense's personal-protection explanation. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-fake-foreign-passport-was-used-in-saudi-arabia-and-other-countries/ +[^10]: "Former Goldman Sachs exec is mystery buyer of $51 million Jeffrey Epstein mansion, boosting victim fund," *CNBC,* 2021, and "Former Goldman Exec Behind Epstein Townhouse Buy," *The Real Deal,* 2021, on the 88 million dollar listing, the January 2021 cut to 65 million dollars, the March 2021 sale to Michael Daffey for 51 million dollars financed with cash and a bridge loan, the proceeds going to the estate's victim fund, and the square-footage and room figures. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/goldman-sachs-exec-daffey-buys-jeffrey-epstein-mansion-in-new-york.html diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Avenue Foch.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Avenue Foch.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c296e560 --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Avenue Foch.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: [Place, JeffreyEpstein, Paris, France, Property, SexTrafficking, JeanLucBrunel, OCRVP] +summary: "Jeffrey Epstein's apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris, searched by French police in 2019 and central to the French criminal investigation into rape of minors and trafficking opened after his death." +location: Paris, France +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Avenue Foch is a wide residential avenue in the 16th arrondissement of Paris running from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne, and [[Jeffrey Epstein]] owned a large apartment there that served as his Paris base. After his July 2019 arrest and August 2019 death, the apartment was searched by French police and became central to a French criminal investigation into the rape of minors and human trafficking.[^1] + +### The Apartment + +Epstein acquired his Avenue Foch residence in the early 2000s through a French real-estate entity, paying roughly 1.5 million euros around 2002 for property within one of the avenue's grand buildings and adding a further unit in 2004.[^2] Reporting described the residence as an eighteen-room apartment in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Paris, steps from the Arc de Triomphe.[^3] + +The apartment was photographed by French authorities during their search, and images later released showed a room decorated in red fitted with a massage table, along with photographs of nude and partially nude young women displayed on the walls and a number of taxidermy and stuffed animals.[^3] One photograph entered into the French record showed Epstein beside two topless women inside the apartment.[^4] + +Epstein used the Paris apartment during frequent travel between his residences, and his presence in France was tied to his relationships in the Paris modeling industry.[^4] The French entity that held the property remained part of his estate after his death, and the apartment was later sold for a reported figure in excess of ten million dollars.[^3] + +### France Connections and the Modeling Recruitment + +Epstein's connection to France ran through [[Jean-Luc Brunel]], a French model agent who founded the agency [[MC2 Model Management]] with about one million dollars in financing from Epstein.[^5] Prosecutors and accusers alleged that Brunel used his modeling agencies to identify young women and girls and direct them to Epstein, steering some to his residences in Florida, New York and France.[^5] Brunel denied wrongdoing.[^5] + +Accusers including [[Virginia Giuffre]] alleged that they were directed to have sexual contact with Brunel and others during trips that included France, accounts that were filed in civil litigation and remain allegations as to conduct in Paris.[^4] Investigators examining the French dimension drew on testimony gathered in separate French inquiries into model agents, including Brunel and [[Gerald Marie]], whose accusers described drugging and assault.[^1] + +The Paris modeling world supplied the link between Epstein's apartment and the recruitment alleged by French and American victims, and the agencies tied to Brunel became a focus of the investigation that French authorities opened after Epstein's death.[^5] + +### The French Criminal Investigation + +The Paris prosecutor's office opened a preliminary investigation on August 23, 2019, after Epstein's death, into allegations including the rape of minors, sexual assault and criminal association connected to trafficking.[^6] The inquiry was assigned to the Office central pour la répression des violences aux personnes, the OCRVP, a national unit of the French judicial police created in 2006 to handle serious offenses against persons.[^7] + +French investigators searched the Avenue Foch apartment in late September 2019, entering on a Monday afternoon and working into the early hours of the following day to collect evidence.[^8] French officials, including the secretaries of state Marlène Schiappa and Adrien Taquet, had publicly called for an investigation, saying the U.S. case had highlighted links with France and that an inquiry was fundamental for the victims.[^9] The OCRVP issued public appeals for victims and witnesses to come forward, citing the international complexity of the case, and reported interviewing several people in the early phase.[^7] + +The investigation continued for years and intersected with the case against Brunel, who was detained in mid-December 2020 as he prepared to leave France and was placed under investigation for the rape of minors, sexual assault and trafficking; he was found hanged in his cell at La Santé prison in Paris on February 19, 2022, a death ruled a suicide.[^5] The Paris prosecutor later renewed appeals for victims to come forward and drew on files released by the U.S. Department of Justice to examine possible offenses committed in France or involving French victims.[^7] + +### Footnotes +[^1]: "French police launch search at Jeffrey Epstein's Paris flat," *France 24,* 2019, and "Properties of Jeffrey Epstein" used for orientation, on the Avenue Foch apartment as Epstein's Paris base, the post-death search, and the link to French inquiries into model agents including Jean-Luc Brunel and Gerald Marie. https://www.france24.com/en/20190924-french-police-launch-search-jeffrey-epstein-paris-flat +[^2]: "French officials call for investigation of Jeffrey Epstein's 'links with France,'" *ABC News,* 2019, on Epstein's purchase of property in the Avenue Foch building through a French real-estate entity for about 1.5 million euros around 2002 with a further unit added in 2004. https://abcnews.go.com/International/french-officials-call-investigation-jeffrey-epsteins-links-france/story?id=64925236 +[^3]: "Inside Epstein's Paris lair: French prosecutors release photos of his flat including red room complete with masseuse table," *LBC,* 2026, on the eighteen-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, the released search photographs of the red massage room and displayed images, and the later reported sale for more than ten million dollars. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/french-investigators-photos-inside-epsteins-paris-apartment-5HjdTS7_2/ +[^4]: "Jeffrey Epstein pictured with topless girls in Paris apartment with sinister history," *AOL,* on the released photograph of Epstein with two topless women inside the apartment and the accounts tying his Paris presence to the modeling industry; abuse described in France is allegation and testimony. https://www.aol.com/entertainment/jeffrey-epstein-pictured-topless-girls-174308994.html +[^5]: "Jean-Luc Brunel, French modeling agent and associate of Jeffrey Epstein, found dead in prison cell," *CNN,* 2022, and "Jean-Luc Brunel found hanged in prison," *Washington Post,* 2022, on Epstein's roughly one-million-dollar financing of MC2 Model Management, the allegations that Brunel recruited and supplied girls, his mid-December 2020 detention, and his February 19, 2022 death at La Santé prison. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/europe/jean-luc-brunel-jeffrey-epstein-death-intl +[^6]: "Prosecutors in France investigate Jeffrey Epstein," *Axios,* 2019, on the Paris prosecutor's August 23, 2019 opening of a preliminary investigation into the alleged rape of minors and related charges following Epstein's death. https://www.axios.com/prosecutors-france-investigate-jeffrey-epstein-da76599d-5d44-4a68-9733-98bf79a97480.html +[^7]: "Paris prosecutor makes public appeal for Epstein victims in France to come forward," *France 24,* 2026, on the OCRVP (Office central pour la répression des violences aux personnes), its creation in 2006 within the judicial police, its handling of the Epstein and Brunel case, and the public appeals for victims and witnesses. https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260218-paris-prosecutor-makes-public-appeal-for-epstein-victims-in-france-to-come-forward +[^8]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Paris Apartment Searched by French Police," *Law & Crime,* 2019, on the September 2019 search of the Avenue Foch apartment beginning Monday afternoon and continuing into the following day. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/jeffrey-epsteins-paris-apartment-searched-by-french-police/ +[^9]: "French officials call for investigation," *ABC News,* 2019, on the August 12, 2019 joint statement by secretaries of state Marlène Schiappa and Adrien Taquet requesting an investigation into Epstein's links with France. https://abcnews.go.com/International/french-officials-call-investigation-jeffrey-epsteins-links-france/story?id=64925236 diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Great St. James.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Great St. James.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..daa5bdcd --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Great St. James.md @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: + - Place + - JeffreyEpstein + - VirginIslands + - Property + - Island + - ShellCompany + - Construction +summary: "Great St. James is the larger island adjacent to Little St. James that Jeffrey Epstein acquired in 2016 for 22.5 million dollars through a shell company whose listed beneficial owner was a Dubai businessman used without consent, on which Epstein conducted extensive unpermitted construction that drew U.S. Virgin Islands stop-work orders and fines, and which his estate sold with Little St. James to Stephen Deckoff in 2023." +location: "U.S. Virgin Islands (off St. Thomas)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Great St. James is a private island of roughly 160 to 165 acres in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], lying directly across a narrow channel from [[Little St. James]] off the southeastern end of [[St. Thomas]]. [[Jeffrey Epstein]] acquired it in January 2016 for a total of about 22.5 million dollars through the shell entity Great St. Jim LLC, after the seller declined to deal with him directly because of his status as a registered sex offender. Epstein then conducted extensive construction across the island without the required permits, drawing a cease-and-desist order in 2016 and a stop-work order in December 2018 from the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources, along with a 70,000 dollar penalty for unpermitted land clearing. The estate sold Great St. James together with Little St. James to the investor [[Stephen Deckoff]] in 2023.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Acquisition and the Shell Company + +Epstein sought to buy Great St. James from Christian Kjaer, described as one of Denmark's wealthiest men, who according to later reporting did not want to be publicly associated with Epstein given his sex-offender status. Epstein structured the purchase through the shell entity Great St. Jim LLC and arranged for the name of the Dubai businessman [[Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem]], the longtime chairman of the ports operator DP World, to appear as the ultimate beneficial owner on contractual paperwork. Reporting indicated that bin Sulayem had declined Epstein's request to use his name and that no signature of his appeared on the documents.[^2] + +The acquisition closed in two recorded transactions in January 2016: a purchase of Kjaer's parcels through Great St. Jim LLC for about 17.5 million dollars, and a further purchase of additional parcels through the same LLC for about 5 million dollars, totaling roughly 22.5 million dollars. Some accounts cite an 18 million dollar figure that reflects only part of the transaction; the combined recorded total is about 22.5 million dollars.[^4] + +After the deal closed, bin Sulayem's name did not appear on subsequent filings, and local land-use permit documents identified Epstein as the sole member of Great St. Jim LLC, revealing his ownership. The concealment surfaced again in 2026 when the connection to bin Sulayem drew renewed scrutiny; on February 13, 2026 he was removed from his chairman and chief-executive roles at DP World and a related Dubai entity after disclosures tied him to Epstein.[^2] + +### Unpermitted Construction and Stop-Work Orders + +The U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources issued a cease-and-desist order on October 28, 2016 for unauthorized development in the coastal zone on Great St. James, after inspectors found clearing and construction activity that the department had not permitted. The department and Great St. Jim LLC subsequently reached a settlement under which the company paid a 70,000 dollar penalty and agreed to corrective actions over unpermitted land clearing.[^3][^5] + +Permit records showed that Epstein planned a complex of structures across the island connected by a private road, including a barge dock, two homes, cottages, an amphitheater, gardens, a marine electrical cable, and a solar array with a generator. Reporting noted that only a single minor permit, for a flagpole and cistern repairs, had been approved, indicating that most of the planned construction proceeded or was attempted without proper authorization.[^6] + +On December 21, 2018 the territory's Coastal Zone Management program issued a stop-work order, and Epstein was subsequently accused of violating it by failing to remove a beach-bar cabana and by expanding a driveway. The construction and clearing on the island continued to draw enforcement attention into 2019. The territory later found, in the course of its civil case, that Epstein had razed the remains of centuries-old structures associated with enslaved workers to make room for his development, and the 2022 settlement required 450,000 dollars to remediate environmental damage on the island.[^6][^7] + +### Sale With Little St. James + +Great St. James was sold together with Little St. James in May 2023 to an entity controlled by the investor Stephen Deckoff, founder of Black Diamond Capital Management, for 60 million dollars. The two islands had been listed in March 2022 at a combined asking price of 125 million dollars, and the sale closed at well below half of that figure.[^8] + +Deckoff announced plans to develop a luxury resort of about 25 rooms on one of the islands, with reporting citing a planned opening in 2025. The sale resolved part of the estate's obligation under the 2022 U.S. Virgin Islands settlement, which had also directed half of the Little St. James sale proceeds to the territorial government and required environmental remediation on Great St. James.[^7][^8] + +The transaction transferred both islands out of the Epstein estate. The combined sale ended Epstein's ownership of the two adjacent islands he had assembled off St. Thomas, the second of which he had acquired and developed largely outside the territory's permitting system.[^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Great Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands" entry, used here for non-controversial geographic data only (acreage, channel position relative to Little St. James); claims sourced solely to it are omitted. For ownership and price, see the reporting in notes 2 and 4. +[^2]: "Jeffrey Epstein used name of wealthy Dubai businessman to acquire second island in Caribbean, report finds." *Fox News,* 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epstein-used-name-of-wealthy-dubai-businessman-to-acquire-second-island-in-caribbean-report-finds ; "Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem: Powerful Dubai tycoon replaced after DOJ reveals sexually explicit emails with Epstein." *CNN Business,* February 13, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/business/epstein-files-bin-sulayem-friendship-intl (shell entity Great St. Jim LLC; bin Sulayem named without consent; February 2026 removal from DP World). +[^3]: "DPNR Orders Cease and Desist for Unauthorized Development on Great St. James." *St. Thomas Source,* November 1, 2016. https://stthomassource.com/content/2016/11/01/dpnr-orders-cease-and-desist-for-unauthorized-development-on-great-st-james/ (October 28, 2016 cease-and-desist; coastal-zone development). +[^4]: For the two January 2016 recorded transactions through Great St. Jim LLC (approximately 17.5 million dollars and 5 million dollars, totaling about 22.5 million dollars) and the discrepancy with the 18 million dollar figure, see the contemporaneous Virgin Islands land records as summarized in reporting on the Epstein islands; "Billionaire Stephen Deckoff buys Jeffrey Epstein's private islands." *CNBC,* May 3, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/jeffrey-epstein-private-islands-bought-by-billionaire.html +[^5]: "Corporation cited by DPNR for development on Great St. James Island." *Virgin Islands Daily News,* 2016. https://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/news/corporation-cited-by-dpnr-for-development-on-great-st-james/ (70,000 dollar penalty and corrective-action settlement for unpermitted land clearing). +[^6]: "DPNR planning visit to Epstein's island." *Virgin Islands Daily News,* 2019. https://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/news/dpnr-planning-visit-to-epstein-s-island/ (planned complex of buildings; single minor permit approved; December 21, 2018 stop-work order; alleged violations involving a beach-bar cabana and a driveway). +[^7]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate Of Jeffrey Epstein And Co-Defendants For Over $105 Million." *U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice,* December 1, 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/ (450,000 dollars for environmental remediation on Great St. James; razed structures associated with enslaved workers). +[^8]: "Financier buys Jeffrey Epstein's private islands, with plans to create a resort." *NPR,* May 4, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173956903/jeffrey-epstein-island-sold-st-james ; "Jeffrey Epstein's two private islands sell for $60m." *AOL/The Independent,* May 2023. https://www.aol.com/jeffrey-epstein-two-private-islands-160710392.html diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Little St. James.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Little St. James.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b5d3bfcf --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Little St. James.md @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: + - Place + - JeffreyEpstein + - VirginIslands + - SexTrafficking + - Property + - GhislaineMaxwell + - Island +summary: "Little St. James is the roughly 70-acre private island off St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands that Jeffrey Epstein bought in 1998 and developed into his main Caribbean compound, where victims alleged repeated abuse occurred, which federal agents searched after his 2019 death and which his estate sold with the adjacent Great St. James in 2023." +location: "U.S. Virgin Islands (off St. Thomas)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Little St. James is a private island of roughly 70 to 78 acres in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], lying about a mile and a half off the southeastern coast of [[St. Thomas]] and accessible only by boat or helicopter. [[Jeffrey Epstein]] acquired it in April 1998 through the entity L.S.J. LLC, of which he was the sole member, for 7.95 million dollars, and over the next two decades built it into his principal Caribbean residence and compound. Victims and locals referred to it by names including "the island" and "pedophile island," and victim testimony placed sexual abuse there across the period of Epstein's ownership. Federal agents searched the island in August 2019 after Epstein's death, the U.S. Virgin Islands government settled a civil trafficking and racketeering case against his estate in 2022, and the estate sold Little St. James together with [[Great St. James]] to the investor [[Stephen Deckoff]] in 2023.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Acquisition and the Compound + +L.S.J. LLC purchased Little St. James in April 1998 for 7.95 million dollars, with Epstein listed as the sole member of the company. The island's recorded area is given as roughly 70 to 78 acres, and a 2019 territorial valuation assessed it at about 63.9 million dollars. The property sits in the East End subdistrict of St. Thomas and can be reached only by private boat or helicopter, a feature that kept the compound isolated from casual observation.[^1] + +Epstein expanded the built environment substantially across the late 2000s and early 2010s, adding a main residence, guest cottages and cabanas, staff quarters, a large swimming pool, a helipad, a dock, and a prominent sundial. At the island's southwest point he constructed a blue-and-white striped, boxlike structure surrounded by a square pavilion decorated with red geometric patterns on a white ground, a building variously described in reporting as a chapel, a temple, and a music room.[^2] Reporting in 2026 stated that internal Epstein documents and the [[New York Times]] indicated Epstein intended the striped building as a "mosque," envisioned with large tapestries, Islamic gardens, and tiles sourced from a mosque in Uzbekistan.[^2] + +Surveillance equipment was reported throughout the compound. Investigators and journalists described cameras positioned across the property, and the August 2019 federal search seized hard drives, security tapes, and other recording media. Online claims that the striped structure was a site of occult or "Moloch" worship circulated widely but were not supported by any verified evidence according to investigators, journalists, and the available records, and are noted here only as unsubstantiated allegation.[^2] + +### The 2002 St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium + +In April 2002 Epstein funded the St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium, an artificial-intelligence gathering subtitled "Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence," organized with the participation of the [[Marvin Minsky|MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky]] and the researchers Push Singh and Aaron Sloman. The symposium itself convened on St. Thomas, and a published account of its proceedings exists under the same title.[^4] + +Attendees later recalled being taken from St. Thomas by boat to a beach on Epstein's island, about two miles away, for a banquet and barbecue connected to the gathering. Several AI researchers who attended described Epstein in unfavorable terms in subsequent interviews, recalling his manner and the atmosphere around the event as off-putting.[^5] + +Minsky's name later surfaced in litigation over the trafficking operation. [[Virginia Giuffre]], in deposition testimony, named Minsky among the men she was allegedly directed to have sexual contact with on the island when she was a minor; the allegation is victim testimony and was not adjudicated, and Minsky died in 2016 before it became public.[^6] + +### Victim Allegations of Abuse + +Virginia Giuffre alleged that she was present on Little St. James across roughly 2001 to 2003, after [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] recruited her in 2000 from [[Mar-a-Lago]] when she was a teenager. Giuffre stated in court filings and interviews that "orgies were a constant thing that took place" on the island and described being passed among Epstein's associates there. These accounts are victim testimony and allegations rather than adjudicated findings.[^6] + +An FBI report cited in later reporting recorded that one victim told agents Epstein spoke of building a "harem" on the island to house multiple girls, and that he wanted "a castle like structure, resembling the Alhambra in Spain." Other victim accounts described the island as a site where Epstein and guests subjected young women and girls to sexual abuse, with the isolation of the location limiting any ability to leave or seek help. The U.S. Virgin Islands later alleged in its civil suit that trafficking continued on the island as late as 2018.[^2][^3] + +Giuffre also alleged that [[Prince Andrew]] and other prominent men were present during abuse on or connected to the island, claims that were central to her civil suit against Andrew, which he settled in 2022 without admission of liability. The unsealing of [[Giuffre v. Maxwell]] exhibits and the 2021 trial of Maxwell produced additional victim accounts describing the island's role in the operation. Each remains attributed testimony.[^6] + +### The 2019 Federal Search + +On August 12, 2019, two days after Epstein's death in federal custody, FBI agents searched Little St. James as part of the [[U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York|Southern District of New York]] investigation into Epstein and his associates. Agents reached the island by boat and helicopter, and video and drone footage recorded personnel moving across the compound on golf carts and removing items.[^7] + +The search reportedly recovered electronic devices, hard drives, phones, photo albums, handwritten notes, travel logs, and security recordings, with one later DOJ evidence list referencing labeled media. Reporting indicated agents seized on the order of two dozen electronic devices from multiple structures on the property. Prosecutors stated the broader investigation into Epstein's network would continue despite his death.[^7] + +The search followed Epstein's July 2019 federal indictment in New York on sex-trafficking charges, which concerned conduct in New York and [[Florida]] and did not itself charge conduct in the Virgin Islands. The territory pursued the island-related conduct through its own civil enforcement action.[^3][^7] + +### The U.S. Virgin Islands Civil Case and Settlement + +In January 2020 the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General [[Denise George]] filed a civil enforcement action against Epstein's estate under the territory's Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the local analog to federal RICO, alleging that Epstein operated a trafficking enterprise based on the islands and that abuse of girls and young women continued on Little St. James until 2018. The suit named the estate, the co-executors Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, and ten Epstein-created entities.[^3] + +On November 29, 2022, George announced a settlement requiring the defendants to pay the Government of the Virgin Islands more than 105 million dollars in cash penalties and forfeitures, plus one half of the proceeds from any sale of Little St. James, with funds directed toward law enforcement, victim services, and human-trafficking and sexual-assault support in the territory. The agreement separately required 450,000 dollars to remediate environmental damage on Great St. James, where the government found Epstein had razed the remains of centuries-old structures associated with enslaved workers to make room for his development.[^8] + +George stated that the settlement "restores the faith of the People of the Virgin Islands that its laws will be enforced, without fear or favor, against those who break them." The settlement resolved the territory's nearly three-year action and conditioned part of the recovery on the eventual sale of the island.[^8] + +### The 2023 Sale to Stephen Deckoff + +In May 2023 Epstein's estate sold Little St. James together with the adjacent Great St. James to an entity controlled by the investor Stephen Deckoff, founder of the private investment firm Black Diamond Capital Management, for 60 million dollars. The combined properties had been listed in March 2022 at an asking price of 125 million dollars, so the sale closed at well under half the initial ask.[^9] + +Deckoff stated that he intended to develop a luxury resort of about 25 rooms on one of the islands, with reporting at the time citing a planned opening in 2025 and framing the project as a tourism and economic-development venture for the territory. Under the 2022 settlement, half of the Little St. James sale proceeds were directed to the U.S. Virgin Islands government, satisfying part of the estate's obligation.[^9] + +The sale ended Epstein's decades-long association with the U.S. Virgin Islands, transferring both islands to new ownership. Reporting noted the unusual challenge of marketing properties so closely identified with the trafficking operation, which informed both the discounted price and the announced plan to rebrand the islands for resort use.[^9] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "Who owns Jeffrey Epstein's island?" *Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/question/Who-owns-Jeffrey-Epsteins-island ; "Jeffrey Epstein's Islands." *Britannica.* https://www.britannica.com/place/Jeffrey-Epsteins-Islands (purchase via L.S.J. LLC, 7.95 million dollars, April 1998; acreage; 2019 valuation). +[^2]: "Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Caribbean Island, Little St. James." *CNN,* March 13, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/us/jeffrey-epstein-little-st-james-island-invs-vis (compound expansion, striped "temple"/"mosque" structure, "harem"/"Alhambra" FBI account, surveillance, debunked "Moloch" claims). +[^3]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Officials: Epstein Trafficked Girls On Private Island Until 2018." *NPR,* January 16, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797011139/u-s-virgin-islands-officials-epstein-trafficked-girls-on-private-island-until-20 (the territorial civil suit; trafficking alleged through 2018). +[^4]: Minsky, Marvin; Singh, Push; Sloman, Aaron. "The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium: Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence." Symposium proceedings, April 2002. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2902676_The_St_Thomas_Common_Sense_Symposium_Designing_Architectures_for_Human-Level_Intelligence +[^5]: "'Skeevy' Epstein gave us the creeps: AI experts recall bizarre island visit." *Raw Story,* 2026. https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/2673860453/ (attendees taken by boat to a beach barbecue on Little St. James; unfavorable recollections of Epstein). +[^6]: For Giuffre's allegations regarding the island, see Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 15-cv-7433 (S.D.N.Y.), deposition and unsealed exhibits, https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Giuffre%20v.%20Maxwell,%20No.%20115-cv-07433%20(S.D.N.Y.%202015)/1330-04.pdf ; the Minsky allegation appears in Giuffre's deposition testimony and is attributed victim testimony, unadjudicated, and Minsky died in 2016. All abuse accounts in this section are allegations and victim testimony. +[^7]: "FBI agents swarm Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island." *NBC News,* August 12, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-agents-swarm-jeffrey-epstein-s-private-caribbean-island-n1041596 (August 12, 2019 search; arrival by boat and helicopter; seizure of electronic devices). +[^8]: "U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Settles Sex Trafficking Case Against Estate Of Jeffrey Epstein And Co-Defendants For Over $105 Million." *U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Justice,* December 1, 2022. https://usvidoj.com/u-s-virgin-islands-attorney-general-settles-sex-trafficking-case-against-estate-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-co-defendants-for-over-105-million/ ; "U.S. Virgin Islands reaches a $105M settlement with Jeffrey Epstein's estate." *NPR,* December 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140096222/jeffrey-epsteins-estate-reaches-a-105m-settlement-with-the-u-s-virgin-islands +[^9]: "Financier buys Jeffrey Epstein's private islands, with plans to create a resort." *NPR,* May 4, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173956903/jeffrey-epstein-island-sold-st-james ; "Jeffrey Epstein's two private islands sell for $60m." *AOL/The Independent,* May 2023. https://www.aol.com/jeffrey-epstein-two-private-islands-160710392.html ; "Billionaire Stephen Deckoff buys Jeffrey Epstein's private islands." *CNBC,* May 3, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/jeffrey-epstein-private-islands-bought-by-billionaire.html diff --git a/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Zorro Ranch.md b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Zorro Ranch.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..872427f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/60 - PLACES/LANDMARKS/Zorro Ranch.md @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ +--- +category: "Landmark" +tags: + - Place + - JeffreyEpstein + - NewMexico + - SexTrafficking + - Property + - Eugenics + - Ranch +summary: "Zorro Ranch is the roughly 7,600- to 10,000-acre New Mexico property near Stanley, south of Santa Fe, that Jeffrey Epstein acquired in 1993 from the family of former Governor Bruce King, built into a hilltop mansion compound with a private airstrip, where victims alleged abuse and where the New York Times reported he discussed a plan to seed the human race with his DNA, and which New Mexico reopened a criminal investigation and a legislative inquiry into in 2026." +location: "Stanley, New Mexico (Santa Fe County)" +created: 2026-06-20 +updated: 2026-06-20 +--- + +Zorro Ranch is a property of roughly 7,600 to 10,000 acres near Stanley in Santa Fe County, [[New Mexico]], about 30 miles south of [[Santa Fe]], that [[Jeffrey Epstein]] acquired in 1993 from the family of the former New Mexico Governor [[Bruce King]]. Epstein built a large hilltop mansion there along with a private airstrip and outbuildings, combining deeded land with state grazing leases that extended his control over the surrounding terrain. Victims alleged that abuse occurred at the ranch, the [[New York Times]] reported in 2019 that Epstein discussed using the site to seed the human race with his DNA, Epstein never registered as a sex offender in New Mexico, and the state reopened a criminal investigation and launched a legislative inquiry into the property in 2026.[^1][^2][^3] + +### Acquisition and the King Family + +Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch in 1993 from the family of Bruce King, the longest-serving governor in New Mexico history, in a transaction reported at around 12 million dollars. The King family had used the property for cattle ranching, and in 1993 Bruce King and his son Gary King, who later served as New Mexico Attorney General, were reported to be in financial difficulty. Epstein retained ties to the prominent King family for years afterward.[^4] + +The acquisition combined deeded land with state grazing leases that Epstein obtained, giving him effective control over a wider expanse than the land he owned outright and adding to the property's isolation, with the nearest neighbors miles away and Santa Fe about 30 miles to the north. Reported acreage figures vary, with sources citing roughly 7,600 acres, about 8,000 acres, and figures up to 10,000 acres depending on whether leased land is included.[^4] + +The property's remoteness and the combination of owned and leased acreage gave Epstein a secluded compound far from any town. The same isolation later featured in victim accounts and in the questions New Mexico investigators raised about how activity at the ranch escaped earlier scrutiny.[^4][^2] + +### The Compound and Airstrip + +Epstein had a large hacienda-style mansion built on a hilltop at the ranch, with county records placing the start of construction in 1999. The main house was reported at roughly 26,000 to 33,000 square feet, and the construction was carried out by Bradbury Stamm Construction, a major New Mexico contractor whose work has included facilities at federal sites in the state. Reporting noted that the contractor's phone number appeared among the entries in Epstein's contact directory.[^5] + +The compound included a private airstrip with a hangar and a helipad, a ranch office, a firehouse, and a seven-bay heated garage, alongside a sprawling courtyard. The airstrip allowed direct private-aircraft access to the property, consistent with the pattern of movement Epstein maintained across his network of homes.[^5] + +Photographs of the interior released after Epstein's death showed eccentric and elaborate furnishings. Some later reporting described unusual features of the construction, and various claims about hidden or underground structures circulated; claims sourced only to unverified outlets are not reproduced here, and the documented record covers the mansion, airstrip, and outbuildings built by Bradbury Stamm.[^5] + +### The DNA and Eugenics Reporting + +The New York Times reported in 2019 that Epstein had told scientists and associates of a plan to use Zorro Ranch as the site of a project to seed the human race with his DNA, describing an idea in which numerous women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth at the ranch. The reporting attributed the account to people familiar with Epstein's thinking and noted no evidence that the plan was ever carried out.[^6] + +The same reporting connected the idea to Epstein's stated interest in transhumanism, a movement combining genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to alter human beings, and to his cultivation of scientists. The plan as reported was a scheme Epstein discussed rather than an executed program, and it remains attributed account rather than an adjudicated finding.[^6] + +Allegations later compiled by New Mexico investigators and survivors connected the ranch to claims of forced births and eugenics, drawing on survivor accounts, diary entries, and files released by the federal government. These allegations are victim testimony and contested claims, and the state's 2026 inquiries were framed in part around examining them.[^2] + +### Victim Allegations of Abuse + +At least ten girls and young women have alleged that they were groomed or assaulted at Zorro Ranch, with accounts beginning in the late 1990s, according to reporting and to New Mexico officials. These accounts are victim testimony and allegations, and Epstein was never charged with any crime in New Mexico.[^7] + +New Mexico prosecutors confirmed in 2019 that they had interviewed possible victims who had visited the ranch, and survivors and investigators later described allegations including rape and sexual assault of minors at the property. The allegations drew on survivor accounts, diary entries, and documents released from the federal Epstein files. Some uncorroborated claims, including a 2019 email alleging that bodies were buried near the ranch, also circulated and were noted by investigators as unverified.[^2][^7] + +Epstein never registered as a sex offender in New Mexico despite his 2008 [[Florida]] conviction and registration, a gap that later drew attention from state officials examining whether the ranch's activity escaped scrutiny. New York's July 2019 federal indictment concerned conduct in New York and Florida and did not charge conduct in New Mexico.[^2][^7] + +### The New Mexico Investigations + +The New Mexico Attorney General's office opened an inquiry in 2019 under then-Attorney General Hector Balderas, interviewing possible victims, but halted the effort in 2019 at the request of federal prosecutors in New York to avoid a parallel investigation. In 2026 the office, under Attorney General [[Raul Torrez]], reopened the criminal investigation, stating that revelations in previously sealed FBI files warranted further examination.[^2][^8] + +On March 10, 2026, state investigators from the New Mexico Department of Justice began a search of the former Zorro Ranch with the cooperation of the current owners, examining allegations that the property may have been used for sexual abuse and sex trafficking. The department's spokesperson confirmed the search in a public statement tied to the reopened investigation.[^8] + +In February 2026 the New Mexico Legislature established a bipartisan investigative committee, described in reporting as a "truth commission," to examine activity at the ranch and whether local authorities looked the other way. The panel, led by Representative Andrea Romero, received subpoena power and a multimillion-dollar budget funded through a prior settlement with Epstein's banks, and by mid-2026 it had issued subpoenas to state agencies, the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office, and other entities and called on survivors to come forward.[^9] + +### Listing and Sale + +Epstein's estate listed Zorro Ranch for sale in July 2021 at an asking price of 27.5 million dollars, with a later report indicating the asking price had dropped to about 18 million dollars. The property did not sell at the listed price.[^10] + +In 2023 the ranch was sold through a public auction to San Rafael Ranch LLC, an entity tied to the family of the former Texas state senator Don Huffines, for an undisclosed price, with proceeds directed toward the estate's creditors. The property was renamed San Rafael Ranch in 2024.[^11] + +Reporting in 2026 identified the Huffines-family ownership and connected it to Huffines's political activity in Texas. The current owners cooperated with the New Mexico Department of Justice search in March 2026. (The prior research note that the ranch was "listed for sale and unsold" reflects the 2021 listing, which did not sell at the asking price; the property was subsequently sold via auction in 2023, a conflict flagged here.)[^11][^8] + +### Footnotes + +[^1]: "New Mexico prosecutors search Jeffrey Epstein's secluded former Zorro Ranch." *PBS NewsHour,* March 10, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-mexico-prosecutors-search-jeffrey-epsteins-secluded-former-zorro-ranch (acquisition in 1993 from Bruce King; location near Stanley; hilltop mansion and private runway; March 10, 2026 search). +[^2]: "How Epstein lured girls to his Zorro Ranch and kept authorities away." *NBC News,* 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epstein-lured-girls-zorro-ranch-new-mexico-investigation-jeffrey-rcna261370 ; "New Mexico reopens investigation into allegations at Epstein's former Zorro Ranch." *CBS News,* 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-reopens-investigation-jeffrey-epstein-zorro-ranch/ (victim interviews in 2019; 2019 halt at federal request; 2026 reopening; allegations including forced births). +[^3]: "New Investigation Launched into Epstein's 7,600-Acre Zorro Ranch." *Time,* 2026. https://time.com/7379228/epstein-zorro-ranch-investigation/ (acreage; legislative investigation; New York Times DNA reporting). +[^4]: "Jeffrey Epstein maintained ties to New Mexico's prominent King family for years." *Santa Fe New Mexican,* 2026. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/epstein/jeffrey-epstein-maintained-ties-to-new-mexicos-prominent-king-family-for-years/article_ec207bfd-18f9-47b2-b8b6-ad519bfa3b52.html (1993 purchase from Bruce King for about 12 million dollars; Gary King; King family ranching; state grazing leases; isolation). +[^5]: "Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch listed for $27.5 million." *NBC News,* July 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-s-new-mexico-ranch-listed-27-5-million-n1273048 ; "Terrifying Details Exposed on Who Built Epstein's New Mexico Ranch." *The New Republic,* 2026. https://newrepublic.com/post/209552/military-contractor-build-epstein-new-mexico-ranch-nuclear (mansion built by Bradbury Stamm Construction; construction begun 1999; airstrip, hangar, helipad, firehouse, garage; contractor in Epstein's contact directory). +[^6]: For the 2019 reporting that Epstein discussed seeding the human race with his DNA at the ranch and his interest in transhumanism, see "Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA." *The New York Times,* July 31, 2019, as summarized in "New Investigation Launched into Epstein's 7,600-Acre Zorro Ranch." *Time,* 2026. https://time.com/7379228/epstein-zorro-ranch-investigation/ ; the account is attributed to people familiar with Epstein's thinking and there is no evidence the plan was carried out. +[^7]: "How Epstein lured girls to his Zorro Ranch and kept authorities away." *NBC News,* 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epstein-lured-girls-zorro-ranch-new-mexico-investigation-jeffrey-rcna261370 (at least ten alleged victims beginning in the late 1990s; Epstein never charged in New Mexico; never registered there; 2019 federal indictment did not charge New Mexico conduct). +[^8]: "Statement from New Mexico Department of Justice Spokesperson Regarding Today's Search of the Former 'Zorro Ranch.'" *New Mexico Department of Justice,* March 10, 2026. https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/statement-from-new-mexico-department-of-justice-spokesperson-regarding-todays-search-of-the-former-zorro-ranch/ (search with cooperation of current owners; reopened investigation under AG Raul Torrez). +[^9]: "New Mexico 'Truth Commission' begins investigation into Epstein's Zorro Ranch, will issue subpoenas." *CNN,* June 1, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/01/politics/new-mexico-truth-commission-epstein-zorro-ranch-subpoenas (February 2026 establishment; Representative Andrea Romero; subpoena power; budget funded through a settlement with Epstein's banks; subpoenas issued to state agencies and the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office). +[^10]: "Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch listed for $27.5 million." *NBC News,* July 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-s-new-mexico-ranch-listed-27-5-million-n1273048 ; "Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico Ranch Lists For $27.5M." *Inman,* July 1, 2021. https://www.inman.com/2021/07/01/jeffrey-epsteins-new-mexico-ranch-lists-for-27-5m/ +[^11]: "Texas businessman running for office owns Epstein's Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County." *Santa Fe New Mexican,* 2026. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/texas-businessman-running-for-office-owns-epsteins-zorro-ranch-in-santa-fe-county/article_14a05944-1e00-47c8-a4c3-071895abfb57.html ; "Huffines family revealed as buyer of Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico." *The Real Deal,* February 17, 2026. https://therealdeal.com/texas/2026/02/17/huffines-family-bought-epsteins-zorro-ranch-in-new-mexico/ (2023 public-auction sale to San Rafael Ranch LLC, tied to the Huffines family; renamed San Rafael Ranch in 2024; proceeds to creditors). diff --git a/League for Spiritual Discovery.md b/League for Spiritual Discovery.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e69de29b