My OCD would be remiss if I didn’t remind you this fine morning that Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on this day exactly one year ago today.

I sometimes wonder if his death was sort of like the “preamble” for all the High Weirdness that would transpire in 2020. But I realize that is all rather simplistic. We all know that 2012 was that “preamble,” and that if we *really* want to delve deep on it, 2001 was that preamble.

I keep extensive “archives” on the various events that have taken place this year, something that came out of a number of legit work assignments I had on the coronavirus. These archives include articles, PDFs, data tables, Tweets, impressions, memes, etc.

Initially, this humble little project of mine only focused on COVID-19. Then it sort of mutated into covering the protests as well. And then…and then it just sort of mutated, period.

What am I going to do with all of this? Will these archives be the fodder for posts to come, or a book? Will books even be a thing six months from now? Or, alternatively, will we all go back to books as the “Post-Information Age” reduces online missives to easily discarded ephemera?

Which brings up a good point. I think part of the reason I conducted this impromptu archive project was a deep sense of the ephemerality of internet content as we know it. Within the past 15 years, I have written well over 10,000 posts. Many of these, especially ones I’ve done for various work entities, are either gone and/or not worth the trouble for me to track down.

And then of course, I’ve taken down collections of my posts my own damn self, only to update and recycle many of them years later. Because to me…it’s all dynamic, it’s all organic. As we’ve moved as a society from tangible & seemingly permanent media to more ephemeral ones, it’s all dynamic and transitory.

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Jeffrey Epstein apparently wanted to live on forever, literally seeding humanity with his spunk as to create a super-race of pedophiles (I made that last part about the pedophiles up, but it’s sort of implied within his overall scheme, I think). See, what I just wrote sounds like a “conspiracy theory,” right? And yet here is a post from The New York Times backing up what I just wrote, here is one from The Independent, here is one from The Hill, and so on, and so on.

So Epstein’s plan to overrun the planet with his DNA was actually something that existed—or, at the very least, something he seriously looked into. Add to that all his extensive contacts and donations to scientific and technological concerns, such as the hallowed MIT (as reported by NYT, The Washington Post, Nature, and, of course, MIT Technology Review). And/or consider Epstein’s extensive political contacts on both sides of the mainstream political aisle (per Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and so on and so on).

That is some wild shit, man. That’s the type of shit somebody would bang out on their manual typewriter 30, 40 years ago in their flea-bitten roach-invested garret with the intention to run off copies at the local library & distribute on a corner of 42nd Street.

But this all apparently (more or less) sort of really happened. And so when Epstein—who very likely had an extensive amount of blackmail on a lot of important people—was found dead of strangulation, and the official word was “suicide”…

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You know…there was something almost charming about “Conspiracy Culture” in the 1990s. I’m talking about the pop-cultural commodification of it. Stickers of neon-green alien heads you can slap on your skateboard. Mulder & Scully mock-fucking on the cover of Rolling Stone.

But now?????

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