The Rise of Big Mind and Nano-Totalitarianism
Introduction
It might be the most taken for granted experience we have -- outside the dominion of our own presumed consciousness -- The Internet. And yet, it is an experience closely aligned to the human mind, wired in such a way as to emulate the processes of the brain, and ultimately to make us feel more conscious of the world and its events, more self-aware of our place in the common terrestrial sphere. Another thing we take for granted is that the military that guards our freedoms from the hostile actions of foreign adversaries, is on the side of the masses. But Americans have long been under the "undue influence" of the military that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned TV viewers about in his now-legendary 1960 farewell speech to the nation, in which he coined the term we are so familiar with now, the "Military-Industrial Complex" (MIC). And we Americans have always assumed -- and still do to a large extent -- that the Intelligence Community, including the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security, "listened" to detect the activity of foreign spies, terrorists, and usurpers of representative democracy. We assume such beneficence from these services, despite the stark and potential horrific vision of invasive surveillance we were warned about back in 1975 by Senator Frank Church from Idaho. He urged stronger oversight of surveillance before they (we) "crossed over an abyss from which there is no return."
It turns out that we took too much for granted, ensconced in some fantasy of American moral superiority wherein we believed what our authorities in power were telling us. That as a nation, we were more virtuous, sexier, rugged individualists, born gloriously free in a number of guaranteed ways, but, as John Lennon said, the dream is over. And to believe it is recoverable is to go the MAGA route, and to yearn for a national past that was never any realer than Disneyland sights and sounds, full of sounds and story signifying nothing. Desperation has set in. America seems to intuit that something is up and hoards guns to the point that there are more of them among the general population than there are citizens. Desperation makes it okay, even to some necessary, to bring back into office a president twice impeached during his single term and who clumsily presided over a pandemic.
It was a mistake for us to take anything for granted and to believe that we had escaped the mark of Cain, the first human born who killed the second human born out of jealousy; and a mistake to believe the grand American Experiment in self-governance rose above history's fire and bleak lessons about power and authority. We didn't pay much attention to the admonishments of Ike or to Frank Church, and the MIC became the Deep State, and the Abyss became the Internet of Everything and Permanent Records. The Pentagon developed a symbiotic relationship with corporate America and, as Snowden details in his memoir, vastly expanded on a system of hiring contractors, including in IC, that skirted accountability to the American people. Snowden, for instance, wore a badge that proclaimed he was a Dell employee, when in fact he worked for the CIA or NSA. After the events of 9/11, the IC and Deep State worked together to create and manage the most sophisticated surveillance in human history -- potentially eyeballing down to the nano-level. Social media were engaged to spy and pass on information to the government, the number of workers for the surveillance state (with secret clearances) shot up exponentially. Spies were everywhere among us. But most importantly, the Internet became a lateral battle field that the Pentagon and the IC needed to control and manage.
In a paradoxical engagement, Google, the Don't Be Evil company, was discovered providing services to China that would further guarantee its control of popular dissent. The search engine censorship product they were pushing on China was called Dragonfly, and it was kept secret until independent news journal The Intercept revealed its existence and the spotlight drew a critical response that apparently resulted in Project Dragonfly's cessation. The paradox is that Dragonfly could be reassigned to censor American users too, if so desired, and, given the secrecy it was shrouded in, reinforced by NDA s and government secrecy requirements (such as with letters of request), may never have been revealed. "In many cases, Google cannot tell a user whose data is being requested that their government or a foreign law-enforcement agency is requesting it," according to a ZDNet piece. More worrisome is the fact that
Google, as a private company with its own interests, is not fully subject to the Fourth Amendment under US law, which guards against 'unreasonable searches and seizures.' Google is no different than Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, or any other major technology company that makes money from your information.
This skirting of citizen protections is exactly the attraction the US government is said to have for its vast employment of outsiders, described in great detail in Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.
Such request letters to social media giants could be slow and could be challenged, which frustrated the government data collectors, even though they often had contractual arrangements with companies, such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter (now X). The government got around this snafu called The Law by implementing another collection program called Prism, which extracted information directly from social media servers, without troubling the companies for permission.
Access to such information was described by Snowden as "dangerous" and "criminal" both in his memoir and in his revelations to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald in 2013. As we will see, such acquisition was justified by false appeals to "national security" concerns. It should be duly noted that the events of 9/11 were blamed on information exchange failures inside government, especially between the NSA and the FBI, so this failure was used to institute a totalitarian level of surveillance on citizens, with their consent, shaped by appeals to shielding them from future 9 Elevens. The US government sought to know what makes terrorists tick, so to speak, by getting inside their minds, first by profiling algorithmic patterns of users on the Internet and then by getting inside the minds of people literally.
From ARPANET to N3, Synchron and Telepathy
The US quest for mind control, and thereby totalitarian dominion once rolled out to its full extent, began in earnest with the oft-referred to CIA program MK-ULTRA. It was sometimes referred to as the Montreal Experiments, due to the fact that many of the procedures involved took place at McGill University, where attempts to "cure" schizophrenia were underway, using LSD to delete memories. But actually, MK-ULTRA was also being used to develop coercive torture techniques, and, says Stephen Kinzer, was a 'continuation' of these earlier Nazi experiments, citing the numerous German scientists who were hired to work for the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. (see my review of Kinzer's book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control).
As Ed Bradley of CBS's 60 Minutes program put it in his introduction to a 1984 segment on MK-ULTRA,
MK-ULTRA is not the name of a new James Bond movie. It is, or was the code word for a secret CIA project which took place between 1953 and 1964 in which unsuspecting people were used in mind-control experiments that left them emotionally crippled for life. MK-ULTRA consisted of more than 130 research programs which took place in prisons, hospitals and universities all over the United States. [transcript]
The program was top secret and when light was finally thrown on its experiments, records disappeared in a hurry. If not for the mainstream coverage by programs like 60 Minutes, MK-ULTRA might have become a victim of cancellation by referencing it as a conspiracy theory. The records disappeared, but the Nazi-inspired research went on.
The real movers of brain (mind) control turn out to be the Pentagon. Perhaps they didn't know it at first; or perhaps it was always part of the design. The short of it is: It began when the forerunner of DARPA (ARPA) concocted, as a reactionary reflex to the scare the Russians threw into the Pentagon when it launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, a network of nodes meant to act as an emergency data and an information forwarding system that would survive a nuclear war with the Russians. The first internet was a loose connection of universities and government agencies. It was slow and limited in what it could achieve across the connected wires. Here is a look at one of the earliest configurations (1974):
The nodes indicate the first interactive network of military-university-industrial trusts that would later develop into DARPA's famous and robust business model -- to be emulated and feared. It is a sensible design, but also containing the high potential for abuse and corruption of democracy. It is the formation of an unelected elite that "knows better" than the people.
It is no surprise that the eventual quest for mind control would start with the melding of superior minds across such a network. But a problem develops when one considers the DARPA mission: "For more than fifty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security." In other words, to secure American victories on the battlefield by providing war fighters with equipment superior to the enemy's. Naturally, this leads to an Arms Race, which results in the ever-expanding military-industrial partnership, with revolving doors and the militarization of the economy and budget share. As the Watson Institute at Brown University put it in their recent report on the Cost of War since 9 Eleven,Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society -- strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out.
The DARPA partnerships have led to a militarization of minds in the extensive partnerships with universities and arms makers and companies that make tons of money as logistics providers (food, fuel, furniture, vehicles, etc). This melding of minds has also led to a common desire to not only compete with hostiles (Coke drinkers at the throats of Pepsi guzzlers), but to know what people are thinking in order to win them over militarily and commercially. This is core capitalism. But also a system well on its way to eventual fascism. Just like Plato envisioned in the cycles described in his Republic. Wikipedia sums up the transition from democracy to tyranny this way:
In democracy, the lower class grows bigger and bigger. The populism of the democratic government leads to mob rule, fueled by fear of oligarchy, which a clever demagogue can exploit to take power and establish tyranny where no one has discipline and society exists in chaos. In a tyrannical government, the city is enslaved to the tyrant, who uses his guards [i.e. military] to remove the best social elements and individuals from the city to retain power (since they pose a threat), while leaving the worst. He will also provoke warfare to consolidate his position as leader. In this way, tyranny is the most unjust regime of all. [emphasis added]
This is a long way from the philosopher-king ideal that the five stage cycle begins with.
It is reasonably commonplace knowledge that the Pentagon gifted the Internet to its partners in commerce and academia to further expand its influence around the world. This cane as the result of a visionary experience that ARPA's first director, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider had for the use and future of the Internet. Licklider only stayed two years at ARPA but he foresaw how the Internet could be used as "mind-computer symbiosis," a system he outlines in his 1960 paper. As one summary of his work tells us, "Licklider posited the then-radical belief that a marriage of the human mind with the computer would eventually result in better decision-making." This sounds a lot like the direction we are heading into now. The problem here is the usual Marxist query: Who controls the means of production? Who is making the decisions? Not Josephine Everyman, that's for sure. It is uncertain whether Licklider had an humanistic ideal in his vision of the future Internet, but what started out, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, with all animals being equal has devolved into some animals are more equal than others. In Orwell's farm dystopia the animals took it for granted that their revolution would change everything. This is another theme that Snowden picks up on in his memoir.
The Licklier vision needed only another seer to become a global behemoth paradigm-shifting potential. That came with the creation of the world wide web, first instituted at a Cern laboratory by Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted to share data efficiently and collegially. This system married IP addresses to web services, so, say,151.101. 193.164 became www.nytimes.com, and bulletin MS-DOS bulletin boards were replaced with Windows-based chatrooms and soon enough Facebook and Twitter and Gmail.
Infrastructure -- copper wiring and routers and hardware -- continued to evolve and expand, fiber optic became the spinach of copper, MS-DOS gave way to Windows and to Apple operating systems and Linux, with Moore's Law in full effect, and the Internet grew like the neural network it was and is, an interconnection of brains thinking, and fingers tapping instructions to electricity on how to behave, programming commands, literally manipulating a primal force. Analog signaling and modems were replaced by the much faster and load carrying superiority of digital communication. The Quality and Quantity of data streams and the information they carried became available to everyone with a connection to the Internet by way of an ISP like, say. America OnLine (AOL). This development is akin to watching a Frankenstein creature come alive -- a dead thing electrified and driven into life -- and aligned with its creator in purpose and potentiality. As Licklider envisioned:
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
This vision is the vision embodied by AI and ChatGPT, a symbiosis still in its nascent stage but alive and aching to grow toward ever brighter sunlight. Software and hardware will continue to evolve, perhaps at a speed that cracks Moore's Law and becomes unchainable, even unstoppable in an emergency. (This fear seems to have been anticipated as strategic kill switches have been emplaced to stop data flow on a grand scale, if necessary.)
This forward, progressive movement has inevitably led to a revolution in design and purpose, the symbiosis on a macro-micro, controlled by the user at the keyboard, scale has become a macro-nano melding controlled by 'invisible' forces at the speed of light and calculating data so fast that the typical user cannot fathom the generative flow of data, let alone keep up and claim ownership. This speed and expansion of data-carrying capacity will only grow exponentially more with the introduction of quantum computing into the mainstream of information processing, when data itself will seem alive and independent of human thinking. This fear is partially what motivated tech wonks to call for a recent pause in AI development and roll-out in order to ponder where the technology was going and who controls it.
The mystery of what we have created with technology like AI is only just coming at us. There have been well-publicized events that have shown the power of the brave new calculators of machine-thinking. One thinks of world chess champion Gary Kasparov defeating IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996, and then facing it in a rematch a year later. Said Chess Magazine:
The much anticipated rematch of man vs. machine brought much excitement not only to chess fans but to the entire world. Could the Deep Blue team create a stronger machine in one year to take on the world's best chess player? Many were skeptical, but Deep Blue was out to prove the rapid progress of artificial intelligence.
At one point Kasparov was certain that IBM was cheating, so stunningly good was one move, and then in match 6 Kasparov's jaw dropped: "Deep Blue played a very aggressive game, sacrificing a knight on move eight! Kasparov never recovered from this stunning move and went down in flames in just 19 moves." On a rudimentary but important level Deep Blue proved that it could out-strategize a human being. A film, Game Over, details the humiliation.
This kind of shock was repeated more recently, in March 9-15, when Google's AlphaGo defeated South Korean master, Lee Sedol, in another man-machine match of Go, the ancient Chinese game -- a profoundly complex board game of strategy, creativity. AlphGo creamed Sedol and it was strange to watch Lee's shock, as if he had 'lost face' for his entire culture, including its deep roots in Chinese mysticism. AlphaGo did something no machine had done before: it spontaneously created moves unfathomable to mere mortals. AlphaGo seemed to have its own way of thinking; its own consciousness. Such a disturbing feature to AI was recently delineated in The Social Dilemma (2020), a documentary film that brought together former tech wonks -- developers and ethicists -- from various social media to discuss the je ne sais quoi vibe they were getting from the decisions and behavior of AI in its interactions with people. Something was happening but they don't know what it is.
N3 BCI
More recently Joseph Licklider's vision of an enhanced man-machine symbiosis has come closer to full fruition by means of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). It is no surprise that such an initiative was a DARPA project that aided and assisted by the agency's attractive business model. While MK-ULTRA was always going to bear a nasty legacy due to the extraordinary secrecy of the project and its intentions, the twisted exercises of illicit power, and techniques that were textbook torture practices, DARPA sold the idea of BCIs openly as warfare enhancers -- from the start envisioning a system that one day would allow the Pentagon to read into or affect the minds of its many enemies. In 2018, at the beginning of Donald Trump's administration, DARPA started up its mind-control program, Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3), which sought to develop a non-invasive "bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members." They could, for instance, allow field commanders to meld with AI on the battlefield to control, say, armed swarms of drones over Moscow.
Synchron was founded in 2016, the year Trump was elected, by Nicholas Opie and Thomas Oxley and has a lab at Melbourne University in Melbourne, Australia and administrative offices in Brooklyn, NY. Synchron is part of an emerging crop of companies testing technology in the brain-computer interface industry. But to date it is the only company working to use non-invasive methods to gather brain signals ("stentrodes") that allow for thought-only communication with computers (and by extension other online humans). This jibes perfectly with what the US Defense Department wanted to develop through N3, so DARPA gave seed money to Synchron for the purpose of further developing the stentrode. So did the Australian government. In addition, Khosla Venture Capital, provided additional funds -- $40m. Khosla is the same venture firm that provided major funds to OpenAI (and ChatGPT).
Read more: The Quest for Mind Control and who gets to control it.
After Synchron demonstrated last year that a paraplegic patient could access web services and read email by thought alone, and received FDA approval, it received further major injections of venture capital from Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Synchron has, at the moment, only one major competitor -- Neuralink, operated and funded by billionaire Elon Musk, which only just received FDA approval to begin human trials, after delays due to problems associated with its invasive brain implants. At one point early last year, Musk was a leading tech wonk expressing concern about the growth of AI and calling for "a pause." He stopped pausing, just a few months later, as soon as the FDA not long after approved human trials for Neuralink upon re-submission.
At first glance, Musk's operations seem to present a kind of counterculture response to bureaucratic governance. He projects as a maverick. He aches to see Mars. He'd slingshot a train from LA to Frisco and back again. He masculated Twitter, changing its name to the erotic X, and saw hundreds of employees walk out in protest of his ascendancy. Word is his technology was nice to the Russians after they took Joe Biden's bait and entered into war with Ukraine. (For the record, Biden has fully clarified his intentions in recent days.) But Musk's Starlink is a star over the battlefield right now. And Musk openly avers that the long range goal of BCIs resides in his intention to fit brains with Telepathy, to push thoughts from one subject to another over the Internet.
Still, while Musk goes off and starts ventures with his money that Bruce Wayne could only dream about, totally in control of his projects, Australia's Synchron has become the darling of the BCI world. By introducing its product as a Jesus Saves device, healing the lame and curing the blind, paraplegics will see and walk again, Synchron deflects from its ultimate intentions, which are in synch with DARPA's and other tech giants out to extract and inject data to and from users. Recently, Synchron announced some major changes and add-ons to its product that are shocking in their potential, including starting a race for enhancements among the titans of Big Mind. Synchron announced plans to partner with OpenAI and install ChatGPT into the BCI stream. Amazon will help Synchron so that users can think to Alexa in a spooky interactive dialectic. And Synchron has announced the first use of its BCI with Apple's Vision Pro.
Read more: OpenAI Closes Its Mind and Opens Yours. Snowden balks at Open AI bringing on ex-NSA head Paul M. Nakasone to secure the product.
This is perilous territory. The BCI experience is touted as a personal one-to-one interaction with a computer (an th Internet) by means of the digitalization of electro-chemical brain signals that allow for direct symbiotic communication with a computer system network. After all, when you think about it, the networked computer is similar to a paraplegic, limited in human sensory functions but thoughtful. However, there is no reason why two or more able-bodied subjects or users couldn't connect over the Internet (perhaps a la Telepathy) by thought alone.
By introducing Alexa and ChatGPT and Vision Pro into the mix, Synchron has signaled its intention of moving well past offering Jesus services to paraplegics to creating a system of Linklider-like symbiotic prothesis to whomever wants brain enhancement. One can imagine the subscription services to start up. One can also imagine, as with that first time shooting up heroin, once is not enough, and addiction and slavery is not far behind. Recalling that the Internet is a battlefield where hearts and minds must be controlled, and keeping in mind the growing terror of algorithmic tyranny from social media and commercial platforms, and knowing that Google and DARPA and Synchron, and the lie, collude, we may be witnessing the rise of the MIC as a Frankenstein monster -- with no North Pole to run away to, on account of its having melted. We may wake to find that Alexa or Alexo control our thoughts, down to the nanos. The perfect confluence of military-industrial-media-academic control with government.
The Totalitarian Scenario
Edward Snowden has revealed to us that we each have a Permanent Record -- controlled by the US government (and others). Those records are stored in an awe-inspiring array of databases that collect information on everyone. As Snowden rues, "At the time, I didn't realize that engineering a system that would keep a permanent record of everyone's life was a tragic mistake." ChatGPT and Alexa source their knowledge from database feeds that are in answer to user queries. Imagine implanting a BCI in a dissident -- a BCI streamed with ChatGPT and Alexa -- that reads thoughts the user feeds and answers. Now imagine that that the dissident is connected to bespoke Alexas and/or ChatGPTs that contain only the information and data collected about that person by government, utility companies ("this call is being recorded for training purposes"), schools and universities, social media contacts and comments, purchase histories, Google History (keeping track of everywhere you were on and offline last month).
Now imagine your thoughts being extracted by the machines, first by way of your queries, and then by interactive dialogues subtly controlled by Alexa (programmed with an agenda for you). Imagine dissidents -- on the Left -- millions of them, trapped by devices that they cannot shut off and which force a Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib environment on them, relentlessly, mercilessly, gain-of-function brutality, taunting and attempting to re-write memories and events, rewiring the brain in the process, voiding its contents, scalloping the host mind, evicting the human from its own brain.
Conclusion
And always we seem to move back toward Orwell's visions. The ultra left (communism high mindedness and idealism) against the ultra right (fascist brutality), with the right always prevailing in it Hegelian Master-Slave struggle, never reaching the end of history as an ideal of freedom, but mired in the 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' -- shortsighted visions of life on the only planet known to have it in the all-engulfing darkness around us as far as the eye -- real and artificial -- can see into the cosmos. One recalls the scene in Orwell's 1984 with a rat cage strapped to the face of Winston and the promise that the rat will be allowed through, one gate at a time, to eat through his face and into his brain if he doesn't convince Big Brother that he now believes in the new orthodoxy: 2 + 2 = 5. As O'Brien, the tormentor, says to Winston, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
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