In the so-called Shigalyov program in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, nine-tenths of humanity must lose their individuality so that one-tenth may live and rule in absolute freedom – if necessary, at the price of “a hundred million heads.” A radical dystopia. And yet it feels less remote the more comes to light about the Epstein complex and its network.

The Epstein files open a window onto a circle in which extreme wealth and political influence close ranks, and where the boundaries between politics, finance, tech, intelligence services, science, and media become blurred. Those who participate in the network gain access – to money, to influence, to research funding, to political power. At the top, it seems, different rules apply than for everyone else: the world as playground of a self-appointed elite.

At the dark center lies documented sexual violence and human trafficking: presumably more than thousand women, often minors, were treated like commodities. Yet the files reveal more than individual crimes. They expose a mindset rooted in social and ethnic hierarchies. Discussions about genetic “optimization” or thought experiments about “climate culling” emerge, while wars or pandemics appear as economic opportunities.

What becomes visible here is the convergence of economic concentration, political leverage, and digital control – which can, in our present scenario, be read as a Shigalyov program under technological conditions. In the event series The Earth Is Red – One Way or Another, we understand the Epstein files as a symptom of a system built on opacity, privilege, and impunity. It points to an extreme political crisis of democracy, attacked by a class struggle from above. This is not only about moral failure, but about concentrated power that evades public oversight. What forms of journalism, solidarity, and civic courage are necessary to defend democratic spaces – and the dignity of those who have been deprived of it?

For what matters is not only what has happened. What matters is the kind of world that made it possible—and whether we are prepared to change it in the name of the many.