The internet is MK-ULTRA, improved
I was doing some background reading for VAMPIRE VALLEY and picked up Acid Dreams, a wonderful book about LSD and how this weird chemical wormed its way into global culture with help from elites, psychiatrists, and various paranoid psychopaths at the CIA who thought acid would help them protect the American Way from diabolical communism. And maybe it did. I first read this book almost twenty years ago. Rereading it now, I got to thinking…
The CIA guys were obsessed with finding a technological solution to mind control. They wanted a simple tool to manipulate people — to get people to reveal secrets, to erase memories or implant new ones, to create unwitting assassins and sleeper killers, to disable entire armies and disorient entire populations. They thought that a drug or a combination of drugs would do the trick, and they threw money at all sorts of sociopathic characters and quack doctors who destroyed people’s minds, tortured housewives, broke up families, treated people like lab rats…all in search of the Holy Grail: mind control. The idea that was being popularized starting in the 1950s was that a human mind was very much like a digital computer. And like a digital computer, a mind could be reprogrammed. New memories could be implanted, old memories could be erased, new personalities could be uploaded. The question was how. Pioneering psychologists settled on some combination of drugs, electroshock therapies, lobotomies, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and overload, and all sorts of other techniques…All this was part of the infamous MK-ULTRA project (and other affiliated efforts), which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s and was overseen by this guy — a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx with an interest in agricultural biology named Sidney Gottlieb. You can see him here playing tennis in 1979.
So anyway, I got to thinking. These guys did all this horrible shit. And for what? Did they succeed? Maybe. Maybe they got some usefulness out of it. Maybe through a lot of effort they were able to implant fake memories and create assassins. Mark Ames gets into that history in a great way in the story of the brainwashed bag lady killer. Is all that effort worth it? Working with chemicals and finding just the right kind of fucked-up and suggestible person and then fucking them up even more, rewiring their mind, controlling their life — all that takes a lot of time and effort…a ridiculous amount of effort for the simple job of killing someone. And anyway, as Adam Curtis explored in an old doc series from the 1990s, people’s minds were just too complex, unpredictable to be reprogrammed chemically in such a simple fashion. Wouldn’t it be easier just to arrange an accident? A fall out of a window, perhaps? A car malfunction? Or a freakish poisoning? I mean, the old-fashioned way still works — plenty of states and non-states still use it. Russia loves the poisons. Israel loves professional assassins. I can’t prove any of this. But if I were to guess, I’d say a lot of these chemical mind control programs never were able to deliver in the way the paranoid bureaucrats at the CIA.
So the MK-ULTRA got a bad rap in the 1970s. But actually, the mind control stuff was just getting started. Even as MK-ULTRA was being exposed in the press and investigated by the government and widely condemned, a whole new type of mind control program was just booting up — a program that involved computers and networks. It was based on a different principle of control: You don’t dose people with drugs, tie them down in a lab, and brainwash them with crude taped messages put on repeat. You do it more gently — you do it with information.
It began simply — as a high-tech counterinsurgency and pacification strategy. The idea was that in order to control people and populations, you first needed to understand them. To know what people feared, what they desired, what kind of social ties they had. Once you had the data, you could model people’s behavior and predict how they would act. And based off of that, you could build out more effective systems of control and manipulation that worked on whatever level you desired: individual, sub-cultural, and whole society. And it worked both politically and commercially — you could govern better at home or sell products more efficiently or fight wars abroad more efficiently, all by using the same computer technology and the same concepts.
The inspiration for this system was SAGE, the first computer-controlled radar defense system that was built to protect American skies from Soviet threats. But instead of scanning and controlling the skies, this future system would scan and control people and societies. NORAD but for crowds. That was the dream…and it has become reality. The internet — and all the computer technology that constitutes it, now including AI — is MK-ULTRA gone global.
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The internet’s hit many of the same goals of the MK-ULTRA program: it’s a truth serum, a brainwashing tool, an assassination technology, a mass pacification and disorientation delivery vehicle…
Just a quick sketch of its possibilities (I’m sure you can add a lot more):
TRUTH DRUG: People are constantly divulging secrets all the time to each other. We’re doing this by communicating our most hidden desires to our computers — think of the stuff people disclose to their search engines and now their chatbots. And we’re constantly being tracked — divulging who we spend our time with, where we go to shop and to eat, who we’re having affairs with. All this information is being ingested, saved, analyzed… The internet is a type of global truth serum. You don’t need to be forced to divulge anything when so much about your life is already known.
ASSASSINATION: The perfect assassin is now just a self-driving Tesla that suffered a glitch.
