How the Epstein Class recruits
I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park and in TORONTO on Tues (Jun 23) at Osler Records. After that, it’s NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:
https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-club-secretly-ranks-its-members/
By all appearances, this is a comically creepy, awful talking-shop for the Epstein Class. It's not all that surprising, in retrospect, to learn that all these terrible people were in a group chat, secretly assigning ratings to one another, and periodically gathering to have tedious panels about, I dunno, "race science" or whatever.
I'm on the oligarchy beat, so stories about Dialog have been popping up in my RSS feed for the past week or so, but it wasn't until last night that I made a connection.
A year or two ago, I got an invite to speak at an event. This is normal, I get a lot of these and I do a lot of public speaking. I'm good at it, and it's a good way for me to reach people and get them energized about the issues I care about. Sometimes, I do these talks for free. Sometimes I get paid.
When I first glanced at this speaking offer, I thought, "Huh, I guess this is one to send on to my speaking agent," because the names the offer dropped were a bunch of rich people, and so I assumed that they were having some kind of summit and looking for a keynoter. Then I read a little more carefully and realized they – these billionaires and their lickspittles! – wanted me to pay them, thousands of dollars, so that I could shlep my ass to some luxury resort in order to have the privilege of speaking to them.
I came up as a science fiction writer, and at some point, every sf writer learns "Yog's Law," coined by James D Macdonald when he was running the science fiction forum on GEnie, under the screen name "Yog Sysop":
money flows toward the writer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald#Educational_work
In other words, whenever you, as a creative worker, are approached by someone who wants to "help" you with your work, and they want you to pay them, they are a scammer, preying upon your essential human need to communicate with others. Run away.
Which is what I did. I deleted the email.
