The Manacle, Network, and the Tree
February was the month I learned that asking “how could things be different?” can be a refrain of despair. It doesn’t have to be.
Six years ago, when I and my former PhD advisor learned of the MIT Media Lab’s secret relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, we chose to leave MIT and set aside the status that it conferred. Hardly a month since then has passed without someone asking me the “how could things be different?” They started as accusations of disloyalty, then pleas of desperation, and later something more. This month, amidst overwhelming revelations from Epstein’s partially-published emails, the question has been full of despair.
One reason the Epstein story feels so hopelessly oppressive is that the files were published by a powerful friend of Epstein who attended the same parties and allegedly had first-hand knowledge of his crimes. Epstein sought to control science with promises of money and influence that he sometimes delivered. His close friend and competitor Donald Trump seeks to control science by undermining public trust, censoring scientists, starving universities of public funds, and forcing university administrators to beg for help from the ultra-rich.
When people ask me my view of changes at MIT, reforms at Harvard, or consequences for Epstein’s enablers, I see why they’re stuck. As a behavioral scientist, I know that bureaucracy alone cannot ward off an abusive hierarchy of misogyny, racism, and power. I can’t sell them an answer simple enough for the cover of the pop science books so beloved at the Edge dinners. But I can offer three metaphors, grounded in the very science of networks that Epstein was so obsessed with owning.
Men like Epstein seek to control women through what social scientists call direct reciprocity. In cases of power imbalance, what seems like generosity is a strategy to narrow a person’s life by providing, controlling, and expecting compliance in return. The jobs Epstein gave his victims were designed to trap them, not support them. Scientists draw this structure as a loop between two people, and it rightly looks like a manacle.
Ending this kind of relationship is costly and can be dangerous under threats of violence. In conditions of extreme inequality, too many people owe too much to a wealthy few. And everyone who owes something to abusers or their enablers becomes a potential accomplice. When people appealed to loyalty in their fearful arguments with me, I saw how far the chain can reach.
Epstein offered powerful men the gift of indirect reciprocity. In this web-like structure, givers contribute to a public good in exchange for reputation. Epstein’s emails show how he coaxed prominent scientists and business leaders with promises of funding and introductions. He then traded on the reputation they conferred to expand his crimes and web of influence. This explains why so many luminaries have blamed others for convincing them to join Epstein’s network, and also why the sticky strands, once revealed, have been so hard to wash off.
The leaders I trusted who were secretly in Epstein’s circle loved to talk about networks as bridges to opportunity and resources. They had a point. But bridges are powerful tools for gatekeeping. And the more embedded someone’s network becomes, the harder it is to join or to leave.
I will never forget the desperation, courage, and solidarity of students who had come to college for new connections and somehow found themselves navigating a tangle that had been dropped on them. When Ethan and I left, we had no idea how large a tear we were making in the fabric of our personal and professional relationships. For years after, I would briefly think of someone who could support one of my own students before remembering, like an amputated limb, that I didn’t know where the relationship stood. I expect some of them have felt the same way.
The manacle and the net remind me of the false sense of determinism promoted by the pop science books that Epstein supported. Luminaries sell us narrow stories about the power to control ourselves and each other when the true beauty in the study of humanity is in variation.
As the communities behind women’s shelters know, chains can be cut. Knots can be untied. Nets can be remade into something new. Because people also organize a third kind of reciprocity. In upstream reciprocity, people contribute without the expectation of benefits in return.
We see upstream reciprocity when someone does the thankless work to stand up for gender equality or support a survivor to seek justice. I saw it in the work of an advisor and his counterparts who ensured that his students graduated after he left. I also see upstream reciprocity in the work of leaders — let’s admit they’re mostly women — who are given the job of picking up the shards of shattered institutions.
But upstream reciprocity doesn’t just take from people — it can also give. When courts try powerful people for their harms and send the damages to public institutions, they sever the bonds of obligation and reciprocity that often follow money. When the good neighbors of a democracy tax the rich to support schools, community colleges, and universities, they untie money from abusive oligarchs and bind the scientific endeavor to the common good.
When social scientists draw upstream reciprocity, we use the shape of a tree.
In a time of so much inequality and mayhem caused by powerful men who dominate public attention, despair offers the false choice of which powerful man to offer favors for protection. But for every person forging manacles or tying nets, there are a hundred people planting trees.
Now when people ask me how things could be different, I have an answer. It’s not my role to say what you or your institution should do. But I have found a home among some great gardeners. And we are planting trees.
A note to readers: a metaphor is also a kind of seed, whose power begins when you let it go.
I will not be responding to comments, critiques, or advice about this post. I wrote it for those who told me they were struggling with the deafening silence in academia in February 2026, and it is all that I have to say for now.
