Something weird occurred to me yesterday. I was writing something family oriented and was doing some internet digging. I wanted to know if a friend from high school, call this person "Charlie", who was still working at Company ABC, which Charlie founded.
It turned out that company ABC sold a few years back to much bigger company EFG. That's great, I'm sure my friend Charlie cashed in well. However, company EFG this year rebranded to company XYZ. Digging further, it had to do with the Epstein files.
The upshot was that the founder of EFG, call him "Bob," was revealed in the Epstein documents as having carrying on unbecoming emails with Ghislaine Maxwell. Maybe the emails were nothing more than middle school silliness - they're described as "flirtatious," who knows?, but they were enough that EFG lost business and they decided to step away from Bob and rebrand to an entirely new name. Poor Charlie was now working under this dark cloud.
Many years ago, my wife had emailed my friend Charlie on an entirely different and benign topic, sports, of all things. But, I found it kind of humorous when the realization occurred to me: my wife is only four jumps away!
Wife-->Charlie-->Bob-->Ghislaine Maxwell/Epstein
I told my wife about my discovery and teased her about how she was four degrees away and that I was mad because she'd now made me only five degrees away.
I chuckled, but then thought it was a bit creepy. "Nothing on the internet ever goes away," they say. There, somewhere between servers, my wife is digitally connected back with that strange man in just three hops. (I'm putting Maxwell and Epstein together here because, as I understand, that was how it allegedly worked).
The old six degrees of kevin bacon game came to mind. I know that, mathematically, we're all much closer than we might initially think. If you're on social media and ever get to see your "social graph," it grows quickly, and gets huge in just a few jumps. Hence the power.
For fun and out of curiosity, I wondered about a six degrees of Epstein. I imagined a web format: put your name in, push the button. It scours the internet for connections - attendances at events, emails made public, blog posts, etc. and then connects the dots. It feeds back your Epstein score or number - how many hops you are connected with him. This fellow had the same idea months back; his number is two.
I spent 20 minutes AI vibe-coding a simple html file. At first, it was to be "six degrees of Epstein," but I didn't like the Epstein part particularly at all. And I wondered, "Since we're all connected to everyone else more closely than we think, why not just connect person X with famous person Y?" Or even, that not famous person I see every now and then down the street and say "Hi" to? So, it became X degrees of Y. You can see a mashed up EXAMPLE, NOT LIVE, version at https://xdegreesofy.netlify.app
Even as I was typing out the prompt I started getting very uncomfortable with it. The idea was for chuckles, but this could be exactly the type of McCarthyist witch-hunt nonsense that entirely wrongly hurts or destroys reputations. If someone was randomly "seated on a plane beside Epstein" and that popped up, that is the kind of thing that does not look good.
The example above is not active, not live, and only generates fictitious examples. It does not scrape the internet for connections. My guess is that such a tool will come, especially with AI's ability to do this sort of thing.
Some examples:
I wanted to focus on the math and how we all get linked up quickly. It wound up being uncomfortable and a bit scary. I'm a Christian and try to abide by the Eighth Commandment - to not give others a bad name, and instead, try to take others' words and actions in the best possible manner and to build up others' good names. I suppose my takeaway is a warning to please be very cautious with this type of thing, of snap-connecting and judging others based on apparent "connections."
