“Epsteinism” & Exocapitalist Violence
I think it's always been clear, to most of us, that the political significance of the release of the Epstein Files has been, is, and will probably be next to zero; as common parlance has on it around the internet these past few days, “the bad guys are a satanic pedophile cabal and we can't do anything about it and they will win.”
It is useless to frame it this way, though, as for what seems like the first time in history (at least on such a scale), we stand before a full, totally undeniable (and forever undenied) display of what it truly means to identify “opposing class interests that cannot be reconciled” and why we simply cannot afford to examine and scrutinize the world and its current state of affairs through the same lenses that we have been wearing for the past 20 or more years. Yet, to elaborate, a surprisingly large amount of context is needed, that will be of use to the closure of this piece.
Back in 2020, a year after Jeffrey Epstein’s declared suicide, a 4chan thread surfaced: “Story Time With A Dead Man” or, the alleged story of a janitor at Little S. James (better known as the billionaire’s own private island) who, according to their own words in the thread, killed themselves shortly after writing it and sending it to 3 major American news outlets.
Timeskip to January 31, 2026: the Department Of Justice releases (overdue by a month) 3.5 million pages of documents from the Epstein Files; 3.5 million pages that, from various reports by a number of news outlets concerning Trump's D.O.J., only constitute about 50% of the files, and according to 4channers and many other people who got acquainted with that infamous thread through YouTubers covering the case, there is remarkable evidence backing up that narrative. The story is well written if put against 4chan standards, and although—as is with every bit of information surfacing from that site—we can't be certain of its truth value (not that it is of relevance at all), it certainly stands as proof of hyperstition.
With that in mind, from the release emerge a couple relevant details: Firstly, Epstein apparently met with 4chan founder Christopher ‘Moot’ Poole, on the same day the ‘/pol/’ board was created, and secondly, an investigation is being conducted on Ghislaine Maxwell’s activity on Reddit (for a while now, users have been conspiring on her running the ‘u/maxwellhill’ account, ‘supermoderator’ of some of the most visited subs on the platform such as ‘r/pics,’ ‘r/politics,’ ‘r/technology,’ and many more. This account was the first in the platform’s history to reach one million ‘karma,’ and it stopped posting at around the same time as Ghislaine’s arrest). While the coincidences in this case seemingly tend towards infinity— that's up to the conspiracy theorists—I wanted to open up by shedding some light on this twofold coincidence for an equal number of reasons.
Reason 1: Going through all this, I can't help but recall a conversation I had with Maks Valenčič back in September on the matter of his research project: ‘Psychotic Accelerationism.’ In spite of him being much more well read than me on both psychoanalysis and acceleration(ism), I managed to keep up in a way that produced an extremely enriching exchange. As I understood, Maks’ project is an attempt to, perhaps for the first time, systematize acceleration through Lacanian psychoanalysis, grounding it particularly on psychosis.
“In other words, the psychotic register—one of the three possible positions a subject can occupy in relation to the Other—provides the structure within which key accelerationist concepts can be explicated and the “accelerationist sensibility” fully understood.”
Conjuring our talk in Venice, this project not only stands as a formal theoretical grounding for acceleration, it appears to me equally revolutionary in the field of Lacanian studies, as it manifests one of the first serious attempts at engaging with the psychotic position of the subject, which is, in a way, the conspiracy theorist’s compass to navigate the world.
Reason 2: In the hours immediately after the 3.5 million pages release, I noticed peculiar images—screenshots emerging from 4chan, Reddit and Twitter threads—starting to circulate.
To me, this paints an extremely specific picture, one that carries a very determinate weight, at the very least in the strictly social discourse (though, I think it's more and I'll leave judgement up to the reader).
The path ahead is laid out by asking ourselves why the Epstein Files would, ever, actually matter to us. Again, any cynically materialist observer of reality would tell you, perhaps rightfully so, that the release of the files will have no legal impact nor consequences on the American elite; the victims won’t receive any justice, as giving a face and a name to the pedophile billionaires will not abolish the pedophile billionaires class: consequently, any inquiry into the files has no effect other than the tearing apart of one’s mental integrity, thus dulling the sharpness of said cynically materialist observation. Any inquiry into the files is a distraction from the flames of class war.
To this claim, many have been adding that, from the definitely less laid-back online & media theory space that actually, the deteriorating of consumers’ mental health is not just a side effect, but the planned outcome of a carefully crafted and methodically calculated strategy of control by the powerful elite mentioned in those files, in order to exhaust, confuse and ultimately desensitize the masses, moving away from a social mechanism of desire-capture to one of desire-suppression given that the truth was, very much, always out there:
“Those in power no longer need to tell a single story. They merely need to flood the space with contradictions, until truth becomes inaccessible.”
Now, while extremely poignant, I think of this analysis as an extremely valuable point of departure rather than a set in stone revelation of ‘what the Epstein Files really are about,’ as more and more people seem to put it. Such a point is to be individuated in a problem persistent throughout both segments of the argument: that of excessive belief in individuated agency.
There was no plan, no premeditation, no interest in all of this. There might be evidence that would point to a plan (i.e. the Epstein-Thiel exchange or the many others that sound similar to it), but looking into it, in actuality, there is nothing that falls outside a series of various instances of seizing of opportunities for power concentration / consolidation in reaction to localized (geo)political developments. The billionaires didn't get together on the island to officialize some grand world domination narrative or to architect the eternal preservation of capitalism; they got together to abusefuck children, knowing they could get away with it, and if relevance to this inquiry is to be found anywhere at all, it's to be found proceeding onwards after stripping this known fact of all the mysticism and the corollary narratives that surround it.
Such cleanup operation takes the shape of a text with which I, and an ever greater number of more experienced minds, have been tarrying with since it launched last August: Exocapitalism (2026), by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo. The book opens up with a terrifyingly simple premise: Capitalism has never had anything at all to do with us. It doesn’t come from us, it doesn’t need us, and it most importantly doesn’t want us. Capitalism is not the cursed child of man, nor is it a conscious alien entity coming from the outside with a very explicit interest in our annihilation (although yes, you could deem it alien). It simply doesn't belong to the scale of the human, it doesn’t adopt the register of human affairs, and it is in fact actively allergic to them both, very rapidly lifting away entirely. This sweeping, grandiose claim might seem outlandish to some (and it definitely did draw many people away from this text when I suggested it to them—lol) but it is in fact very substantiated:
“Let’s unpack this. What do we mean when we say capitalism can be done on anything? Capitalism is a mode of description that can be applied when an object from one world (situation, relational matrix, representative layer) is transcoded into an object in another world and when the status of reciprocal representation between those worlds is in some kind of flux.”
Value-production doesn’t need a billionaire cabal to rush in its defense: all value-production might need to sustain itself is the possibility for abstraction, a possibility that has existed since long before our first evolutionary steps on the Earth. But if that is the case then, what is, really, the way forward from here? Is it so over? And mostly, what does Epstein even have to do with this?
To answer these questions, especially the latter most, it is from here, on this now clean surface of unspeakable atrocities, that we need to proceed. As cleverly observed by my friend and colleague Saima Dawood, head of the newly founded Dawran Press:
“Epstein Should Be An -Ism.”
“Epsteinism,” or the definite proof that critical theory has been stagnant and, especially, that the left has completely lost track of ‘what is to be done.’ Lift, lift, lift, is all one finds scrolling through the files (filtering out the depravity, which is what should actually propel us to action). Epstein is & has been a placeholder (and now recently turned memetic warfare weapon); Epsteinism is the US Government & state(s) assemblage, Epsteinism is Dimes Square, it is Qatar, the UAE, Iran, mid and post-Berlusconi Italy. The back wheels of the war machine.
With lift (& the rest of its conceptual toolkit, of equal relevance) in mind, Exocapitalism closes its violent shake-up of the contemporary theory landscape with an aptly titled last chapter: ‘The Last Mile.’ “The last mile of bones and blood into the earth,” a gory and ever weaker bridge from immanence to transcendence; the paradigm of the Real in a 21st century capitalism that, finally, fully manifests its labor-allergic condition. An emphasis on this conclusive section is to be put in its distinction-making structure, drawing well-visible conceptual borders “between exocapitalist objects, the organizing principles of the socius (state sovereignty, feudal sovereignty), and empire.”
Zooming in on empire, the authors depart from Silvia Federici’s research on social reproduction—which identifies an economy of social reproduction running parallel to (but not really separate or distinct from) capitalist economy, through a continuous process of dispossession sustained by localized oedipal structures of violence and oppression—to an even more mercilessly realist assessment of the state of affairs: actually, the distinction is there, and it is, as usual for this text, one that can’t but be drawn at scale.
“We disagree. The last thing a company actually wants to do is control the soil, the subsoil, the trees – those are fixed, limited, resources, they are liabilities at best.”
After completely severing the economic interest ties between value-generation and social reproduction, they remark:
“Empire begins with the uneven distribution of resources around the earth as it intersects with the metabolic requirements of its residents (as expressions of the earth itself). In this sense, one can say that Empire is concerned with social reproduction, albeit at the highest-possible scales – one could even say that Empire is social reproductive force as inscribed upon the earth.”
It is now time to start looking inwards.
Throughout the multiple times I came back to this text, I could never quite grasp to what degree of seriousness to take the claim that “there are no exits”. The release of the files helped with that. No way out of lift, no enemies to take down: “the problem is us,” literally. What is curious (and what prompted this longform response) is that, in some ways, for a time, the psychotic got dangerously close to ‘looking inwards’, way earlier than a number of neurotic leftists, myself included. If Gaza (and all the other martyred populations laying down on our screens) didn’t make it clear enough, now is the time to think in terms of transcendence, distinctions, systems, entities, computation, libidinal economy, forms of life. You don’t get from lift to an ethos of universality, you get to universality from the recognition that it’s (now more than ever) up to us to pave the (still missing) way out of the self-sustaining rape of land, of peoples, of bodies, human or animal, dead or alive.
The release of the Epstein files did not pull back any veils on the “true nature of the elite”, it did not and will not bring justice to no one; all it did was reinforce certainties that were, to varying degrees across the spectrum of political subjectivation, always here. “Epsteinism” stands as one of the (multiple and distinct) underlying, structural drives of that localized imperialist violence, especially when stripped of its cheap internet culture mythologization that is hollow and a contingent prefix attributed to mostly any imperialist force—the narrative’s main target shifting with algorithmic attention. The same drive pushing an upper middle class, middle-aged white man to acts of sexual violence manifests all throughout the world’s elite as per explicitly stated in the files; a labor-grounded analysis simply fails to think through this truth— capital certainly cannot act as our scapegoat.
Bibliography
“Praxis, or: How to talk to your friends about Communism” — Becoming.drainer, 2025, Instagram post
“Story Time With A Dead Man” — Anonymous 4chan thread salvaged through the Internet Archive, 2020
“Psychotic Accelerationism” Seminar Program — Maks Valenčič, 2025, New Centre For Research & Practice
“The Psychology of Exhaustion - Exhaustion as a Mechanism of Power” — Mike Cadler / Fieldnotesbymike, 2026, Instagram post
“Epstein Should Be An -Ism” — Saima Dawood, 2025, Substack
“Exocapitalism” — Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo, 2025, Becoming Press