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By Burnt Banksy
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It may be insane to leverage transformative verification technology just to sell a T-shirt that says: “I wasn’t in the Epstein files and all I got was this lousy shirt.”
It’s meant to land like a gut-punch of absurdity because that’s where we are. A document dump isn’t just news anymore. It’s a sport. People refresh, clip screenshots, and treat names like collectibles. Context becomes optional. Nuance collapses into captions. And whether you’re guilty, innocent or simply adjacent, the internet’s first instinct is the same: feed the frenzy.
If you’re wondering why I’m comfortable using spectacle to raise money, it’s because I’ve done it before and learned how to do good.
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Five years ago today, I burned a $95,000 Banksy artwork as a public stunt. People called it reckless, tasteless, brilliant, cynical—sometimes all at once. The point was to force a conversation about digital art and value, and it showed that attention itself had become a currency. It worked. The story traveled, the debate followed, and the digital representation of what I destroyed ended up selling for nearly $400,000. I learned that if you can hijack attention, you can redirect it to help others.
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So, my second money-making stunt meets the moment on its own terms: a fast, privacy-preserving way to verify one narrow fact, paired with a piece of merchandise that dares you to laugh at the insanity of it all.
It’s a ridiculous sentence, printed on a ridiculous garment, born from a ridiculous moment in modern life. We now treat public document dumps like content drops. We share frenetically. Context gets stripped out. Nuance collapses into a caption. The reputational consequences are immediate and often irreversible.
The shirt is a joke. The problem it points to is not.
The internet is experiencing a trust crisis. The cost of “proving” anything online increasingly involves exposing far more than the claim requires from your inbox, your identity, your private history, essentially your entire digital life.
That is not a sustainable term for civic life. It fosters a culture of spectacle and a culture of surveillance. When the only way to refute a claim is to publish your private life, people choose silence or they choose theatre. Meanwhile, platforms keep rewarding outrage because outrage is easy to produce and hard to disprove at speed.
Here is the narrow fact in this campaign. It checks one thing only: whether a given email address appears in the publicly released Epstein-related email correspondence. My “lousy shirt” is an attempt to make the absurdity visible. It is also a small public demonstration of an idea I believe matters: we need ways to verify narrow facts without forcing people to surrender everything else.
That is where privacy-preserving verification comes in. The internet does not lack information. It lacks low-friction ways to prove specific claims without oversharing. If a question is narrow, such as “Is this email address in this dataset?” then the proof should be narrow as well. It should not require publishing an inbox. It should not require disclosing unrelated contacts. It should not require handing over identity documents to third parties, or inviting strangers to trawl through personal material in the name of transparency.
When verification is expensive, slow or invasive, people avoid it. When verification is low-cost and respectful of privacy, it becomes culturally usable. That matters because it changes incentives. Journalists can demand evidence that is checkable, not theatrical; platforms can privilege verifiable claims over viral ones; individuals can respond to rumors without turning their lives into public property.
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Fragile Funding
This campaign is designed to raise funds for Asiyah Women’s Center, a Brooklyn-based emergency shelter supporting women fleeing domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. I’m using a provocative hook because that’s what cuts through. And the goal is to get dollars to a place where donations turn into beds, specialized case management, trauma therapy and safety.
Asiyah is not a trendy cause and it is not safe work. It is a front-line “battlefield” with women who are escaping violent partners, trafficking networks and coercive control, often with nothing but the clothes they are wearing.
Asiyah’s founder and executive director, Dania Darwish, has described how the organization lost federal funding during the Trump administration while refusing to compromise its advocacy on behalf of victims.
“Survivors cannot wait for political climates to shift,” she said. "When public funding becomes uncertain or politicized, the consequences fall on the women who need services that same day.”
This is the part that rarely gets said plainly. Charities like this operate downstream from politics, but upstream from human catastrophe. Administrations change. Budgets swing. Headlines move on. A woman still needs a bed tonight. A trafficking survivor still needs specialized case management. A mother still needs safety for herself and her child.
That is why the stunt is blunt. It is not trying to be tasteful. It is trying to be effective.
I know the criticism that comes with mixing satire and tragedy. People will say the shirt trivializes the underlying crimes. It doesn’t. It confronts a different ugly reality: the way the internet metabolizes horror into content and then demands that ordinary people participate in the spectacle—either by accusing, defending or oversharing.
You will not find a political loyalty test here. What you will find is a mechanism for raising resources for survivors and a reminder that our public discourse has become so chaotic that we now need “not in the files” merch to survive it.
If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should!
The attention economy runs on discomfort. Most people pretend they’re above it while still clicking. I prefer to be honest about it and redirect it. If a lousy shirt makes you laugh, and that laugh turns into funding for an emergency shelter, then the punchline becomes a lifeline.
In a healthier culture, we wouldn’t need stunts to fund basic safety for survivors. We wouldn’t let essential services become a political football. Until that culture exists, I’ll take the absurdist route: make the internet look at itself, and send the proceeds to the people doing the real work.
Anthony Anzalone, known online as Burnt Banksy, first made headlines in 2021 when he torched a Banksy artwork and sold the video of it as an NFT for $380,000. Now he's building XION, a blockchain designed to eliminate the usual crypto friction: users don't need wallets or technical know-how. They can simply sign in with an email or pay with a credit card.
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