The scale is mind-boggling: there are three million pages of Epstein Files in the last major release, and millions more out there. I can’t quite picture what a million pages looks like, much less how one guy could send so many e-mails.

In many ways, the files fit the definition of what certain types might call a hyperobject: something so big it can barely be comprehended, so dense with importance that it warps reality around it. All of the plastic in the ocean is a hyperobject; The Epstein Files might be another.

Released after a surreally public campaign of censorship, and with a deliberate lack of context otherwise from Team Trump, the Files are a Borgesian library maze containing a dizzying amount of trap door strewn pathways. Even putting aside the flurry of bad faith misinterpretations and urban legend exaggerations, the Files seem to hint at something so big and deeply embedded in our culture we’ve only previously grasped it through flights of HBO-produced fancy.

For a while in the 2010s, pop culture was full of yarn and corkboards – True Detective, Inherent Vice, It’s Always Sunny’s Charlie in search of the elusive Pepe Sylvia. Epstein-mania cranks this mentality into overdrive, as if those madly strung yarn strings are connecting the stars and constellations themselves over our heads. As it happens, it doesn’t end well for real life corkboard artists—Williamsburg artist Mark Lombardi’s death in early 2000 testifies to that. The obsessive researcher produced massive, handdrawn charts painstakingly connecting the doings of international financiers, governments, and terrorists, only to die mysteriously in his apartment, perhaps either a shadowy hit by forces who didn’t appreciate his bohemian muckraking, or simply another lonely big city suicide.

How does one even navigate the Files? Discarding the slew of red herrings—anonymous FBI tips from obvious lunatics with tales of Epstein and Trump casually barbecuing infants, etc.—does nothing to stunt the effect. More plausible stories abound: Did Epstein really bury two girls on the grounds of his New Mexico ranch property after killing them during rough sex? I mean, he seems like a guy who might have done something like that—his frequent email buddy Steve Bannon once rented a trap house that turned so toxic it literally poisoned the person who moved in after him (and that’s to say nothing of the infamous acid-scarred hot tub.)

Epstein’s intelligence connections, political deal brokering, and curious habit of referring to suspicious deaths with a casual ‘whoops’ paint a picture of someone who, if he wasn’t explicitly on Mossad or CIA payroll, functioned as intelligence for his own rogue operation and its boutique economic and political interests.

His puzzling alliances call into question the way we were supposed to imagine political reality—he got Steve Bannon chummy with Noam Chomsky, and beckoned Bill Gates to his island with mentions of ‘new administration’ people being there in 2016. 

If the election of Trump upended the liberal consensus—whoops, it turned out all the ’80s punk singers were right after all—the Epstein Saga has the same destabilizing effect, with even darker implications. If it gets people a little hysterical, maybe it’s because the only reference points we have for guys who, for example, spend their spare time tending poisonous trumpet plants, with which to rape and blackmail, tend to be in fiction. 

Then, there’s the stuff no one who values living in a stable, shared reality wants to talk about: the instances where Epstein and his cronies seem to lurk and tinker at the very event horizon of our imagination. 

Sure, it’s one thing if he had a hand in creating the concept of microtransactions in gaming. Hell, maybe it’s just a coincidence that the 4chan /pol board was created right after Epstein met with the site’s airhead founder, Christopher ‘m00t’ Poole.

But what exactly did Hollywood producer Barry Josephson mean when he referenced a conversation Epstein had with Bill Gates about how to “get rid of all the poor people”? 

In conversations with German MIT scientist Joscha Bach—a leading voice in the AI movement, whose research Epstein also funded—the two mused eugenically on race science, climate apocalypse, and the notion that “many mass executions of the infirm and elderly make sense… if the brain discards unused neurons, why should society keep their equivalent?” 

Epstein shaped the nascent AI field with millions of dollars of donations to MIT, chatted with rich crypto guy Bryan Bishop about making designer babies—oh yeah, and there was that plan to seed the human race with his DNA. In Lolita, the pedo protagonist Humbert’s fantasy and master plan is to create and raise a line of fuckable progeny. Epstein’s sci-fi designs are like a fractalized 21st century version of this: populating the world in his narcissistic image, molding both human biology and technology to fit his whims..

Endless, looming and weird, the Epstein files are like those Eldritch beings out of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Like those beasties, the dissociated knowledge in the files feels capable of spawning raving lunatics; browse the socials and you can see the increased paranoia creeping in further every day. A tide of Lovecratian madfolk are coming; the New Dark Age awaits.

But it’s no wonder people are confused: the release of the Files, and the online landscape they were released to, were all crafted and curated by Epstein’s buddies. Even before he was palling around with Zuckerberg and Gates, he was attempting to shape the narrative by founding NYC gossip rag Radar Magazine in the early 2000s, and offering to assist Theil’s attack on Gawker a bit later. He paid people to hack Wikipedia to keep his mugshot off the net, and to bury his name in Google results; and of course he and his circle also were busy pillaging the old newspapers—all the better to sculpt the replacement.

The result, even if it’s just the desperate tactic of a flailing Trump administration, has the effect of information warfare — shrapnelized information fed through the whirring apparatus of social media. It’s like the scene in a detective show where the fleeing criminals start setting fire to the loot to create a smokescreen to throw off their pursuers. 

We probably won’t ever shake Epstein-mania. One close historical analogue to Epstein might be Rasputin, the (equally?) hard to kill monk who grifted Russia’s royal family in their waning days and lives on in history as a mystic madman. The truth is he was probably just a weird guy who liked orgies. 

Likewise, Epstein was a thoroughly man-sized monster. His and Ghislaine’s creepy, satanic undertones were just cheap stage dressing for a grim but run of the mill program of pimping, gaslighting, honeypotting and ratfucking.

Fortunately, the files shed light on this too:

Epstein was also a midwit racist, obsessed with boneheaded race science, chronically talking shit about all the other boring rich guys in his orbit—the charmless dorks buying access to misled women and drugged girls from a guy crafty and well connected enough to assure them it was all sophisticated business. 

His alliances make sense when you figure out he was just pimping to the arrogant, overrated cream of the crop from every field and industry. It worked both ways: if you’re rich enough, you can get Deepok Chopra to stamp his guru seal of approval on your rambling, schizo nonsense. If your general deal is sexual abuse, blackmail, and brokering deals with mafia like intelligence agencies and bloodless CEOs, it’s handy to have a Woody Allen on hand to lend your shit some bourgeoisie charm.

The conversations between Epstein and Bannon do contain some striking foreshadowing of world events, but as the pair constantly reassure each other with the phrase / cope mantra ‘Art of War,’ they start to sound less like masters of cloak and dagger and more like two bullshitting suburban dads who just listened to the same podcast the night before.  

At the end of his life (no, the body switch thing probably didn’t happen), Epstein was a boring dick, reduced to complaining in emails about the injustice dished out to his fellow pervs and rapists and haplessly plotting his own unlikely image rehab. At the end of the day, as the tweet goes, Cthulhu is just a big squid guy.

Real heads know it was the horror writer Thomas Ligotti who inspired True Detective’s cosmic horror streak— Rust Cohle’s grizzled metaphysical ramblings were pretty much plagiarized from Ligotti’s pessimistic philosophy tome The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

The real Cosmic Horror, that book suggests, is human consciousness itself—a once useful biological fluke that doomed us to a life of knowing too much about a meaningless universe. In order not to be driven mad by the sheer amount of pointless suffering in the world, we spend our lives stringing ourselves along with trivial distractions and processing our deep-seated fear of the howling abyss laughing at us just out of frame.

(If that hits too close to home, or sounds kind of romantic in a goth way, then probably know that Epstein felt the same way — as he smarmily reminds someone: “you don’t consciously decide anything … it’s a fiction you tell yourself . :)”)

While True Detective remained focused on Epstein-esque plots in its succeeding stories, the show would ditch cosmic horror at the end of the first season, when the Ligotti-fied main character Rust Cohle examines the stars and declares, “I think the light must be winning.” (The real Ligotti would be repulsed.) 

The scene is cosmically incorrect; science tells us those stars will drift farther and farther apart before everything gradually fizzles out. But there’s something in the Epstein Files that suggests Ligotti may be wrong too— it’s not the universe that’s laughing at us — it’s just a bunch of rich guys, with names, addresses and weird penises.  

Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, David Dinkins and that mural on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen.

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Illustration is by Devon Blue.