Transhumanism and the Philosophy of the Elites

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Danica Thiessen

Source: PANDA

In 2004, when Foreign Policy asked eminent scholar Francis Fukuyama to write an article answering the question, What is the world’s most dangerous idea?, he responded with a piece titled Transhumanism. Fukuyama argued that the transhumanist project will use biotechnology to modify life until humans lose something of their ‘essence’, or fundamental nature. Doing so will disrupt the very basis of natural law upon which, he believes, our liberal democracies are founded (Fukuyama, 2004). For Fukuyama, these losses lay unrecognised beneath a mountain of promise for a techno-scientific future of imaginative self-improvement.

Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which transhumanism plays a central guiding role, is shaping the policies of global corporations and political governance (Philbeck, 2018: 17). The converging technologies of this revolution are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive sciences (NBIC), and artificial intelligence (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002). The political class and the new technology elite routinely tell us that ‘the age of AI has arrived’ (Kissinger et al., 2021). Simultaneously, modern humans have also become increasingly dependent on advanced technologies and the complex systems they enable. These changes have presented new challenges to old questions, namely: what does it mean to be human? And what future do we want for ourselves?

From the hype of super-intelligence to self-assembling nanobiology, the world can seem increasingly science-fictional. Contemporary technological society is “harder and harder to grasp”, is full of “disruptions…that move ever faster”, and is confronting us with “situations that seem outrageously beyond the scope of our understanding” (Schmeink, 2016: 18).

This paper aims to further our critical engagement with an ideology that is emerging across influential sectors of society. With this aim in mind, I will make three essential arguments: Firstly, transhumanism is a movement based on a techno-scientific belief system that is striving towards the technological enhancement of biology and, in this regard, is self-consciously promoting bio-social engineering. Secondly, the technologies of transhumanism have the potential to bring tremendous financial and political gains to corporations and governments who are not incentivised to seek out nor address their potential dangers. Thirdly, the discontent towards transhumanism is diverse and comes overridingly from the threat to traditional values, nature-based ways of life, freedom, equality, and the loss of bodily autonomy to the will of those who operate these powerful systems.

Much of the current scholarship on transhumanism focuses on the intellectual contribution of the movement, with minimal work assessing socio-political impacts. This neglect is worrying since, within the reality of global capitalism, transhumanism may be overridingly motivated by economic and political forces as it may be by ideology. Furthermore, perhaps only a minority of humans may be able to access certain NBIC technologies or utilise them for profits (McNamee and Edwards, 2006: 515). Of course, the socio-economic ramifications may be culturally and politically disruptive in unanticipated ways. It is this overwrought relationship—of transhumanism, the global economy, profitable science, human nature, and traditional belief systems—that demand further critical examination.

Transhumanism: A brief history

Transhumanism is a predominantly Anglo-American movement that has flourished since the 1980s in “American circles of science fiction fans” and with “computer experts and techno-geeks” (Manzocco, 2019: 36). Today, California’s Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological optimism and imaginative entrepreneurship, is the hub of transhumanist thought and innovation. Though scholars have noted that there is no single definition of transhumanism, the essence of transhumanist ideology is to use science and technology to re-design and re-shape the human condition away from randomness, imperfectability, and decay, towards order, perfectibility, and control (Bostrom, 2005: 14).

This ideology emerged in early 20^th Century Britain. There is a clear continuity of ideas between current proponents of transhumanism and those who were writing before the Second World War of the potential of science to shape the trajectory of nature, while fostering international cooperation and governance. They included British scientists and thinkers such as Julian Huxley (credited with first using the word Transhumanism in the 1950s), his brother Aldous, and his grandfather Thomas Huxley, as well as their colleagues J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells, J.D. Bernal, and Bertrand Russell. These influential thinkers and internationalists were writing and working on promoting political and scientific outlooks that would form the basis of a century of scientific transhumanist thought (Bostrom, 2005: 4-6; Bohan, 2019: 74-108). The subjects they explored still attract transhumanists today: behavioural conditioning, genetic control, technological augmentation, artificial foods and wombs, space travel, life extension, and total disease control. These and other themes circle around the assertion that nature, including human nature, operates optimally under scientific adjustment and management (Bohan, 2019: 99-100).

Early transhumanists (or proto-transhumanists) viewed techno-scientific advancement as a cure for ‘primitive’ human nature (anger, violence, excess fertility), physical limitations (disease and possibly death), political ignorance, and international conflict. It was the Enlightenment ideal of mastery over nature, including human populations, that Aldous Huxley so aptly demonstrated in his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, written in 1931, illustrates a scientific dystopia where transhumanist aims (genetic engineering, anti-aging interventions, biotechnology and enhancement drugs) are used to manage society implicitly through pleasure rather than explicitly through force. Huxley’s depictions were based less on his prophetic abilities and more on his intimate knowledge of the possibilities of social engineering as discussed and promoted by the scientific minds with whom he mingled. His later essay, Over-population, surmises that his novel’s projections were “coming true much sooner than” anticipated (Huxley, 1960: 1).

Notably, Aldous’s brother, Julian Huxley, also wrote about the ills of global overpopulation while promoting the genetic control (‘improvement’) of populations through eugenics (Hubback, 1989; Huxley, 1933). His 1957 essay, Transhumanism, claimed that man was the “managing director” of “evolution on this earth” (Huxley, 2015:12-13). He was very involved with Britain’s Eugenics Society for over three decades, serving as Vice-President and then President, as well as supporting “campaigns for voluntary sterilization…and for negative eugenics measures against persons carrying the scientific stigma of ‘mental defect’” (Weindling, 2012: 3). Julian Huxley was the first Director-General of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund (Byk 2021: 141-142). In this role, he promoted the ideology of an international, scientifically-founded welfare state to further his aim of liberating “the concept of God from personality” because “religions as all human activities is always an unfinished work” (Byk, 2021:149), (Huxley, 1957:10). Julian Huxley’s work and writing envisioned an international social engineering project based on rational scientific management that promised to elevate humanity towards global peace (Sluga, 2010; Byke, 2021:146).

Philosophical and Spiritual Transhumanism: Towards a Technological Utopia

Transhumanism has a wide variety of interpretations, similar to how a major religion is expressed with a divergence of commitment, beliefs and motivations. In fact, many scholars consider transhumanism to be a novel, emerging religion with significant parallels to Christian eschatology (deGrey et al., 2022; O’Gieblyn, 2017). The vast majority of transhumanists do not accept a monotheistic ‘God’ or the moral restraints of traditional religions, but instead endow “technology with religious significance,” leading scholars to define it as “a secularist faith” (Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012: 710).

While not all transhumanists partake in techno-spiritual views, transhumanists essentially view technology as the redemption for fallible biology. For some, these perspectives were inspired by the philosophical work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Tielhard de Chardin was a palaeontologist and Jesuit who believed that a “worldwide network would be woven between all men about earth” and that a “God-like entity” would form from a future “conscious, collective, omniscient mind—the Omega Point” (Bohan, 2019:92). The concept of technological ‘transcendence’ has continued to be central to Transhumanism in conversations about the worldwide web, the Internet of Bodies, artificial intelligence, and the ‘Singularity’, which is the belief that human-machine intelligence will grow exponentially and reach a point where humanity will be thrust into a posthuman age (Bohan, 2019:96; Kurzweil, 2005). The belief that humans (or rather posthumans) can become immortal and ‘god-like’ in a future machine-dominated age—complete with astral travel and digital telepathic communication—is why, in its philosophical form, many scholars understand transhumanism as a techno-materialist religious movement.

In an attempt to consolidate such a complex movement, transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom—current head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and transhumanism’s most legitimate academic—co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (Bostrom, 2005:12-13). Out of this work, the Transhumanist Declaration was drafted. It consists of bold statements such as: Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition. The Declaration concludes with: Transhumanism advocates for the well-being of all sentience whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human mammals. The Declaration makes it clear that transhumanism is an unprecedented social engineering project promoting the desirability of using “technology to push the boundaries of what it means to be human and to transcend our biological condition”, as described by Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine (Mayor, 2018).

Two American transhumanist philosophers who have worked, since the 1980s, to spread transhumanist ideas, are Max More and Natasha Vita-More. They are entrepreneurs in the cryonics industry, which deep-freezes human corpses (called ‘patients’) with the aim of future revival (McKibbin, 2019:184-185). Vita-More, in a recent interview, emphasised that the essence of transhumanism is, “a transition of being human-animal into becoming more mechanised using different devices and technologies to enhance humans into whatever they feel that they are.” This very Californian-esque promise of becoming ‘whatever you want to be’ could result in a more mechanised, or augmented, version of you. We already see the emergence of this new ‘becoming whoever you want’ phraseology in the popular acceptance of enhancement chemicals, biotechnology, and videogames. A pantheon of new technologies is on the horizon: exoskeletons, virtual reality, robotics, body-changing pharmaceuticals, remote-controlled nanotechnology, artificial foods, brain implants and synthetic organs. Adopting these technologies is a part of what Max More describes as becoming the Overhuman, otherwise known as the Posthuman: if you are Transhuman you are essentially a transitional human.

In The Overman in the Transhuman, More attributes attitudes in transhumanism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, arguing that the overhuman is the “meaning-giving” concept meant to “replace the basically Christian worldview” of Nietzsche’s time (and, to a lesser extent, our times). More holds that the current “relevance of the posthuman” is that it ultimately gives meaning to scientifically-minded people” (More, 2010:2). In this influential paper, More asks the reader to “take seriously Nietzche’s determination to undertake ‘a revaluation of all values’” (More, 2010:3). Since a modern overhuman upgrade will depend on human gene editing and other biotechnology applications (such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink) becoming legally available, More’s call to ‘reevaluate values’ is understandable. Issues raised on both sides of the academic debate concern which values and traits would be genetically chosen, and to what extent human enhancement will be voluntary (Levin, 2018).

While earlier Anglo-American eugenicists argued for the removal of anti-social genes by sterilisation, some modern transhumanist proponents have argued that moral bioenhancement, through selective gene editing, should become compulsory (Persson and Savulescu, 2008). Many notable transhumanists argue for procreative bioenhancement of offspring by the parents (Levin, 2018:38). Transhumanist advocates Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu believe moral enhancement should become obligatory like “education and water fluoridation,” since “those who should take them are least likely to be inclined” (Persson and Savulescu, 2008: 22). Transhumanist Niel Levy argues that “cognitive enhancement could be required,” much as vaccines currently are (Levy, 2013:38). Scholar Susan Levin writes that allowing a techno-scientific transhumanist vision to shape the “form that society takes” may lend itself to “socio-political requirements that would clash with…liberal democracy” (Levin, 2018:50). She also argues that when transhumanists use “public health analogies and reasoning” to “justify vigorous enhancement” they are putting into serious question their commitment to autonomy (Levin, 2018:48). In this way, the coercive vaccine mandates used during the Covid-19 pandemic can be interpreted as an early warning signal for how future bio-enhancements are likely to be accompanied by forceful moralistic and utilitarian arguments.

Ingmar Person, Julian Savulescu, and Niel Levy are prominent ethicists at the University of Oxford; all three advocate for mandatory genetic enhancement despite the trail of 20th century trauma wrought by grandiose social- and eugenic engineering projects. Does this suggest that a moral framework based on utilitarian arguments and flawed metaphysics remains fundamentally unchanged in public health governance since the last century? In his recent book God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet, scholar Michael Northcott argues that a growing “post-human agenda” has become central to policies around public health—referred to as “biosecurity”—which has very little to do with authentic “human health or health of the environment” (Northcott, 89). The consequences of this ideology became apparent during the recent mandating of the experimental gene-altering vaccines, and could represent what Northcott refers to as “automatism”. This is when we are culturally obligated to “use new technologies regardless of the possible consequences” because of a utilitarian ethic of the “managerial goal of efficiency” (Northcott, 2022: 114). To underestimate the suffering caused by one-size-fits-all public health measures is inadequate scholarship, yet despite this, only a minority of academics have openly questioned the use of coercive genetic therapy during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A clash between individual rights and a movement that aims to “re-design the human condition” seems inevitable. In the words of transhumanist scholar Nick Bostrom, “human nature is a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remould in desirable ways” (Bostrom, 2005: 3). As the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, David Pearce said,

“…if we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to re-write our bug-ridden code and become god-like…only high-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world”.DOEDE, 2009: 47

It is human nature that often comes into direct conflict with massive social engineering projects. Understanding transhumanism as a bio-social engineering project of unprecedented scale is a useful perspective in that it focuses the potential conflicts as value-based and ideological rather than as a direct result of specific scientific advances (Broudy and Arakaki, 2020). Furthermore, the term ‘social engineering’ is in itself inadequate, in that a utopia that aims to phase out Homo sapiens, while making way for the new, enhanced posthuman, is historically unprecedented (Bauman, 2010), and is possibly an energetic form of nihilism or an expression of ‘losing oneself’ to an intoxication with machine power, inspired by what scholars identify as “machine fetishism” (Geisen, 2018: 6). Yet, the surprising willingness to martyr one’s physical self to attain paradise has always been particular to our species (Pugh, 2017).

Corporate Transhumanism: The Pursuit of Wealth and Power

In congruence with the scholarly work available, I have focused on the ideas of philosophical and academic transhumanists, but transhumanism is an ideology reaching far beyond discourse. Though under-discussed in the academic literature, the movement is advanced by corporate and political transhumanists, and transhumanist scientists. Massive corporate and state investment in NBIC technologies rely on specialised scientists working in the military, elite universities, and corporate laboratories to push the frontiers of reality with robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (Mahnkopf, 2019: 11). These scientists are designing technologies with such potential that the world’s most powerful players, such as the Chinese Communist Party and the US Department of Defense (DOD), are deeply involved. In January 2023, Harvard University’s esteemed chemist Charles Leiber was on trial for lying to the DOD about his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology over his work on “revolutionary nanomaterials.” In his Harvard laboratories, Leiber and his assistants have created nanoscale wires that can record electrical signals from neurons (Silver, 2022). Nanowire brain implants were designed by Leiber to “spy on and stimulate individual neurons” (Gibney, 2015:1). In an age where neurotechnology and mind-machine interfaces are changing the nature of warfare, the contested power-potential of transhumanist techno-science is quickly apparent (DeFranco, 2019).

The transhumanist vision for the future should not be viewed outside of the ‘technological arms race’ or a competitive, utilitarian mindset that informs business, war-making, and our cultural esteem of scientific research. This suggests that more research understanding corporate and political transhumanists is critical in analysing how this group is actively involved with determining humanity’s future. Political leaders with a sharp sense for power understand that machine intelligence and enhancement may determine the world’s winners and losers (Kissinger et al., 2021). As Vladimir Putin articulates: “Artificial Intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world” (Karpukhin, 2017). The elite fascination with transhumanist technologies concerns the potential power inherent in the technology itself—and in who creates and controls it. The influential historian and speaker, Yuval Noah Harari, expressed this view in his 2021 Davos Summit presentation where he said that technology “might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you hack something, you can usually geo-engineer it.”

Harari is a frequently featured speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and associated events. The WEF is currently acknowledged as one of the “most significant case studies of private authority with global impact” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). Criticised as being a “transnational elite club, with high media visibility” and a neoliberal “agenda-setting power,” the WEF can be understood as an “instrument for global geopolitical domination” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). At the very least, it is a forum where heads of state, CEOs of multi-billion-dollar companies, and academics who intelligently promote strategic values, are encouraged to collaborate and shape the global future. On WEF and other media collaborative platforms, Harari eloquently argues for humanity to “break out of the organic realms to the inorganic realm” with the creation of a new type of machine human so much more sophisticated than us that our current form will be more drastically different from it than “Neanderthals” or “chimpanzees” are from us today (BBC, 2016). Perhaps this epochal vision is received with welcome at the WEF because it boldly asserts a future dystopia for those who choose to ignore this high-tech revolution. It may act as a motivational warning to “acculturate” or “disappear.”

Scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020) believes WEF agenda setting is accomplished through strategic political and corporate marketing and the discourse of “future essentialism” where the “fabrication of power” and of an inevitable global destiny is reinforced by “sociotechnical imaginaries” and “epochalism.” Future essentialism is the construct of narratives that use “historical analysis…speculative estimates…and hard statistics” to disseminate an idea of a “fixed and scripted…future” that can be “desirable if harnessed” but also “dangerous if humanity fails” to accept the vision. “Epocholism” is an attempt to capture “The Spirit of the Age” and promote a feeling that the current times are of unsurpassed historical significance. These strategies, Schiølin (2020:553) convincingly argues, are how the “WEF produces a moral-political universe around The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).” Is it possible that these techniques can create a narrative of urgency, significance, and global opportunity that can persuade us (or our leaders) to participate in a transnational, transhumanist future?

Klaus Schwab is the founder of the WEF and the one responsible for conceptualising and promoting this revolution, which was announced in his 2016 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab (2017) describes the 4IR as a social re-setting (named the ‘Great Reset’) enabled by “a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” Analyses of the 4IR conclude that the rate of technological change is supposed to “accelerate” and be “exponential”, covering the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, automation, genetic engineering of humans and natural biology, nanomedicine, smart cities (where sensors are embedded all over the environment), a sci-fi enabled military, and algorithms with political agency (Trauth-Goik, 2021: 3).

Political scientist Klaus-Gerd Giesen convincingly argues that transhumanism is the “dominant ideology” of the 4IR, having become a “grand narrative” for politicians while “advancing the interests of multinational tech giants” (Geisen, 2018: 10). Giesen views this revolution as a “significant rupture in the evolution of capitalism” as well as the tradition of humanism, arguing that “transhumanist machinism” is “fundamentally anti-human—not least because the machine is by definition inhuman” (Geisen, 2018: 6). With global 5G networks, the Internet of Things and of Bodies, and the convergence of the NBIC technologies, the “body as market” (Geisen, 2018: 10), or what Céline Lafontaine defines as the corps-marché (Céline, 2014), is complete. The sheer mass of consumption will exponentially rise with marketable ‘smart’ products: “wearable tech, autonomous vehicles, biochips, bio sensors” and other new materials (Mahnkopf, 2019: 2). This is a materially focused future where consumer upgrades are baked into the system, so it’s no wonder that corporate monopolies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the “new industrial kings” are actively promoting this revolution (Mahnkopf, 2019: 14).

In his book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, the environmentalist Bill McKibben writes that, “the Silicon Valley tycoons are arguably the most powerful people on earth” (McKibben, 2019: 183). North American West Coast transhumanist visionaries are an avant-garde community of ultra-rich technologists, businesspeople and inventors who are idolised by the media and who collaborate extensively with the US State to advance their aims. Eric Schmidt illustrates the collaboration common between US State defence organs, academia, and giant technology corporations (Conger and Metz, 2020). With a net worth of $23 billion, Schmidt was the Executive Chairman of Google and is now the current Chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) for the US Department of Defense, where he advised President Biden to reject a ban on AI-driven autonomous weapons (Shead, 2021). Schmidt believes that artificial intelligence will “govern society” and be “perfectly rational”, outdating and rendering useless human intuition and knowledge. As with most tech billionaires, Schmidt has set up a private charity, Schmidt Futures, and has so far donated a billion dollars towards his AI educational aims (Philanthropy News Digest, 2019). While he admits that he did not design Google to regulate ‘misinformation’ more effectively, censorship is increasing with the accelerated abilities of AI (working with humans) to moderate and remove content on the Internet (Desai, 2021).

Many of our most influential technologies come from programmes at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA funds ‘blue sky’ technology research and is credited with inventing the Internet, GPS, virtual reality, and drones. The agency is now set on advancing human augmentation both in and off the battlefield, with the goal of mastering brain-computer neural-interfaces (Krishnan, 2016). Arati Prabhakar is the former head of DARPA, and Chief Science Advisor to President Biden. Prabhakar, like the prior head of DARPA, Regina Dugan, moves between working with technology companies in Silicon Valley and the US Department of Defense. Like most, she is enthusiastic about a transhumanist future of augmentation, and advocates for this as a matter of national security. And yet, she also admits that this “will bring surprises that we may not like. For generations we have thought about technologies that change our tools – but this is about technology that changes us.” We already have ample evidence that our current technologies, particularly wireless devices and chemicals, are physically changing our human (and planetary) biology, but the aims of DARPA and the DoD are more ambitious and revolve around the complete mastery of evolution (including the human genome) and natural systems (including the human population) using technology (Carr, 2020). This is exemplified in the recent, far-reaching US Executive Order for Advancing Biotechnology, which states that “we need to develop genetic engineering technologies” to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” The order states that this is to “help us achieve our societal goals.” These societal goals are central to what the White House identifies as the “bioeconomy” where “computing tools and artificial intelligence” will help us “unlock the power of biological data”, scale up production, and reduce “obstacles for commercialization” (Biden, 2022).

In March 2022 at the World Government Summit, Elon Musk, a self-identified transhumanist, and the world’s wealthiest individual, spoke bluntly from the podium. He announced that he sees the upcoming AI apocalypse as a human-extinction event. What is the solution? “We must all become cyborgs if we are to survive the inevitable robot uprising.” This may be marketing, since Musk’s Neuralink is poised to start human trials of brain implantable chips” (Neate, 2022). Radically enhanced human cognition should, Musk predicts, counterbalance the dangers posed by super-intelligent machines. If the richest man on earth prophesied a mass AI extermination event and an inevitable posthuman future from the platform of the World Government Summit, should we dismiss it as just another tech business strategy?

In her analysis of the 4IR, Birgit Mahnkopf (2019:2) writes that a “system of physical-to-digital technologies embodied in machines and equipment…would enable sensing, monitoring, and control of the entire economy.” This is occurring against a backdrop of increasing global inequality and centralisation of wealth. It is estimated that eight men own as much as half the monetary wealth of the other eight billion humans (The New York Times, 2017). Schwab and other elites understand the social and political implications of their technological ideology and the rules of the ‘winner-takes-all’ market economy that will continue to consolidate gains from disruptive technologies. Universal basic income and social credit systems (with a resource-based economy and central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) are presented as solutions to managing popular resistance and social unrest.

The WEF represents the fusion of transhumanist goals within global governance. As Schwab notes, the organisation has been very effective at ‘penetrating the cabinets’ of national governments. As Harvard scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020:549) astutely observes, the “4IR is justified as kings and emperors once justified their authority as divine and natural in uncertain times.” Hence, it may be that the potential problems from transhumanist ideologies come, not so much from the prospect of an AI take-over, but from the elites’ use of the culture and technologies of transhumanism. It may be that these risks overwhelm liberal democracies long before sentient AI does.

The Discontents

Few intellectuals note the opposition to transhumanism better than the transhumanists themselves. Nick Bostrom writes that resistance comes from:

“Ancient notions of taboo; the Greek concept of hubris; the Romanticist view of nature; certain religious interpretations of the concept of human dignity and of a God-given natural order; Karl Marx’s analysis of technology under capitalism; various Continental philosophers’ critique of technology, technocracy, and the rationalistic mindset that accompanies modern technoscience; foes to the military industrial complex and multinational corporation; and objectors to the consumerist rat-race.”BOSTROM, 2005:18

Bostrom’s summary is a panorama of human expression, literature, thousands of years of culture, religion, philosophy and human meaning-making. Modern literature on philosophy, culture and technology, from Jacques Ellul, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman and Wendell Berry to Jürgan Habermas and Martin Heidegger, offer poignant critiques that are relevant to opposing transhumanist visions of the future, and remind us of the value of community, embodied wisdom, and traditions, and the effects of technological systems. The difference in writing styles is noteworthy: while pro-transhumanist writing tends to be utilitarian and have a tone of scientific authority, ‘bioconservatives’ will often use narrative, symbols, and a writing style considered traditionally beautiful in human culture.

What is noticeable is that the opposition to transhumanism is broad, ill-defined and diverse. Nick Bostrom notes that “right-wing conservatives, left wing environmentalists and anti-globalists” are all pushing back against central transhumanist aims (Bostrom, 2005: 18). Firstly, there are the well-published intellectual and academic opponents that engage in a forceful scholarly debate with transhumanism over issues such as biotechnology, threats to liberal democracy, and scientific materialism (Leon Kass, 2000 and Francis Fukyama, 2003), and the environmental and social costs of transhumanism (Bill McKibbin, 2019). Also noteworthy are the bioethicists, George Annas, Lori Andrews and Rosario Isasi, who have advised making “inheritable genetic modification in humans a ‘crime against humanity’” (Annas, et al., 2002: 154-155). These scholars fear the posthuman potential for inequality and war, warning that, “the new species, or ‘posthuman’, will likely view the old ‘normal’ humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter…it is the predictable potential for genocide” (Annas, et al., 2002: 162). The common factor amongst these academics is that they believe biological engineering (of humans) would be disruptive to values, rights, and equality, and would threaten liberal democracy itself. These men have been labelled bio-conservatives or, more dismissively, Neo-Luddites, for rejecting the legitimacy of a posthuman future (Agar, 2007:12).

The second group that is emerging as anti-transhumanist are the environmentalists, non-conformists, primitivists, and anarchists committed to Wild Nature with forceful anti-industrial sentiments. In North America, this includes elements of the Deep Green Movement (Bilek, 2021), represented by various writers, artists, activists, ecologists, organic farmers, herbalists and healers, forest-dwellers and hunter/gatherers, spiritualists, and various alternative people, off-grid or nomadic, who refuse to live within a mechanised, industrial system, and may intentionally attempt to sabotage it. As an eclectic group, they have significant influence over specific geographical areas, tend to identify with traditional local indigenous values, and deeply resent Western consumerist culture, war, global corporations, pollution, and industrial infrastructure (Tsolkas, 2015). Notably, some ecofeminists have written that biotechnology is a dangerous “extension of traditional patriarchal exploitation of women” in promoting the reshaping of natural human bodies (Bostrom, 2005: 18).

The third group that has rapidly developed increasing opposition to transhumanism is religious groups. Besides the Mennonite and Amish communities, who maintain ‘old world’ lifestyles across significant sections of the United States, there is a rising anti-transhumanist sentiment and increasing religious fervour amongst some Evangelical Christians across North America. The New York Times reported on the increasing politicisation of evangelical congregations, with defiant unifying songs that repeated, “We will not comply” in the chorus (Dias and Graham, 2022). The language these groups use to describe transhumanism is often symbolic, archetypal and apocalyptic, and understood as an epic battle between light and darkness. For example, speaker and writer, Thomas Horn, has been preaching about the dangers of transhumanism to Christian congregations for over a decade. His books have titles such as Pandemonium’s Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the Ubermensch (Overman) Herald Satan’s Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God. Suspicions of ‘Satanic technology’, and anti-transhumanist sentiments may have been a part of the reason why Evangelical Christians were the demographic most unlikely to cooperate with Covid vaccination mandates in the United States (Lovett, 2021; Porter, 2021).

The tragic situation in Ukraine suggests that ideologically-driven wars may increase with the growing animosity between religious and transhumanist world views, or this may be used in war propaganda. The Russian Orthodox Church, with well over one hundred million members, considers the invasion of Ukraine as a battle of light and darkness, with ‘Holy Russia’ fighting against an unholy NATO alliance (Klip and Pankhurst, 2022). The Church Patriarch, Kirill of Moscow, has taken a strong position against biotechnology—including “gene therapy”, “cloning” and “artificial life extension”—and views the Russian Orthodox Church as defending the traditional family against the liberalism of the West (Stepanova, 2022: 8). Addressing the leaders of Russia at the recent 24^th World Russian People’s Council, the orthodox believer and philosopher Alexander Dugin proclaimed, “this war is not only a war of armies, of men…it is a war of Heaven against Hell…the Archangel Michael against the devil…the enemy came to us…in the face of LGBT, Transhumanism—that openly Satanic, anti-human civilization with which we are at war with today.” It may be that an influential number of religious Russians believe that they are not fighting against Ukraine at all, but rather rescuing it from the Satanic hold of the Transhumanist West (Siewers, 2020).

The fourth major group that is exhibiting overwhelming anti-establishment sentiments towards what is perceived as the ‘elites’ and their ‘transhumanist agenda’ are the politically and economically disenfranchised working classes and displaced farmers. Known in academic circles as ‘populists’ (Mazarella, 2019: 50), this group has recently displayed significant anger over extended ‘lockdowns’; losing the freedom to travel and to access decent healthcare (in the US); and experiencing unemployment and poverty. Their physically non-compliant behaviour, seen in mass demonstrations, notably across Europe and with the Canadian truckers, has been met with discursive and physical violence from increasingly irritated political leaders and media corporations. These ‘populists’ often reject transhumanism as an elitist ideology that they fear will lead to further loss of bodily autonomy, increased surveillance, political disempowerment, and a reduction of dignified employment to robots and automation (Mazarella, 2019: 130-134). These fears are not altogether unfounded since, according to the WEF, the 4IR is proposed to lead to significant worldwide job losses, perhaps up to 70% (Mahnkopf, 2019: 7). Steven Bannon, the instrumental ‘populist’ of Trump’s 2016 election force, uses religious polemics to rally resistance against what he sees as a rising transhuman globalist agenda. His popular show, the War Room, features broadcasts such as Descent into Hell: Transhumansim and the New Human Race. The outrage this group has towards 4IR transformations and transhumanism cannot be underestimated: within the US many working class families, though not all, also hold values of egalitarian weapons ownership, and their discourse exudes a willingness to engage in violent confrontation over threats to bodily autonomy (Sturm and Albretch, 2021: 130).

The United States’ most infamous anti-transhumanist/anti-technologist came, not from religious circles, but from within the radical environmental movement and academia. Theodore Kazcynski, a mathematical genius and professor at UC Berkeley, conducted an anti-technology terrorist campaign that spanned 17 years, killing three people and injuring 23 (Fleming, 2022). He blackmailed the FBI into publishing his 35,000-word thesis titled Industrial Society and its Future in the Washington Post and New York Times, which led to his capture. Since spending 25 years in solitary confinement, he has published volumes about how to conduct a revolution against the scientific elite. In one volume, The Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, he writes,

“The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass human intelligence and natural selection will favour systems that eliminate them (humans)—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be eliminated.”KAZCYNSKI, 2016: 79

Kazcynski reacted with terrorism to what he considered an existential threat posed by technology to humans and his greatest love, Wild Nature. His fear was a loss of freedom and masculine human nature, as well as the transformation of society into a controlled Brave New World, something he viewed as inevitable without a revolution (Moen, 2019: 3). In fact, it is arguable that the United States was already too similar to the Brave New World for Kazcynski, since he depicts “fighting industrial society” as “structurally similar to escaping a concentration camp” (Moen, 2019: 3).

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Technologies, authored an influential essay at the dawn of the 21^st century, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, advocating for the relinquishment of developing “AI, nanotechnology and genetics because of the risks” (Joy, 2000). Interestingly, Joy argues for the legitimacy of Kazcynski’s logic about the threats of advanced technologies, despite Kazcynski having “gravely injured” one of his friends, a computer scientist, with a bomb. Parts of Kazcynski’s writing that shifted Joy’s views included the following:

“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them…eventually a stage may be reached in which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will effectively be in control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”JOY, 2000: 48-49

This scenario is not too hard to imagine since it is quickly becoming our modern predicament. There is an implicit and explicit consensus in much transhumanist and anti-transhumanist thought, by Musk, Kazcynski, Joy and many others, that this phenomenon is leading, and will continue, to this logical end. The other scenario that Bill Joy quoted in his essay, again from Kazcynski, was:

“On the other hand, it is possible that human control over machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own…but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be ‘superfluous’, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. Or if they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elites.”JOY, 2000: 48-49

Interestingly, the scenarios do not seem mutually exclusive, at least for a time.

Scholar Ole Martin Moen has noted similarities between Kazycinski, Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu in their projections of a future crisis (Moen, 2018: 5). Like Kazcinski, Bostrom has argued that transhumanist technologies expose humanity to a significant risk of eradication (Bostrom, 2019). Savulescu, also like Kazcyinski, argues in Unfit for the Future: The need for moral enhancement, that evolved human nature combined with transhumanist technologies will lead to catastrophic consequences (Persson and Savulescu, 2012). Kazcinski, who believed these outcomes were logical, reacted with violence because his highest ethic was one of authentic, uncontrolled freedom (Moen, 2018:5-6). His life is a warning that some human natures may be entirely incompatible with a techno-scientific future. In fact, the transhumanist vision of human extinction and a ‘posthuman’ future may actually promote anxiety and violence in some humans.

Conclusion

Martin Heidegger has warned that those who seek to use technology’s influence without realising the immense power that the technology has over them, are trapped into becoming extensions of machines rather than free actors. They are “framed like men with advanced computational devices into seeing all of reality as computational information” (Doede, 2009:49). For thousands of years, human existence and meaning-making has accumulated from “birth and death, flood and fire, sleep and waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves, the ebbing and flowing of the tides” (Powys, 1930: 73), and it seems fitting to question if our highly evolved human tissues and ‘natures’ are strengthened or undermined by advanced technology. Is it possible that human flourishing is encouraged by the ancient struggle with the limitations of our own animal natures, rather than by conforming to the constructs of complex technology? With transhumanism, who is in control and who benefits?

It may be fair to say that transhumanism is a bio-social engineering project that ultimately concentrates power in machines, and humans who behave with machine-like characteristics. Large sections of the earth’s population, such as various religious groups, the working class, indigenous peoples, and other nature-based humans, may resent undemocratic announcements from forums like the WEF that, with the 4IR, industrialization is accelerating towards genetic engineering, robotic automation and virtual living. Furthermore, we may risk promoting an existential crisis and extreme reactions in those who dislike being told that the future belongs to the posthuman rather than to themselves and their offspring. It is a contested future and one that is entirely unwritten.

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Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Reid Mukai

Recent revelations that the renowned linguist and political activist met with Jeffrey Epstein several times have surprised and confused many. Why was Epstein interested in meeting with Noam Chomsky? And why did Chomsky agree to meet him despite his past? The answer may surprise you.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal published a report detailing information contained within a “trove” of previously unreported documents of the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Those documents, which have not been publicly released and appear to have been passed solely to the Journal, included Epstein’s private calendar and meeting schedules. The documents, per the Journal, contain “thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017” and – as the report notes – detail Epstein’s dealings with several prominent individuals whose names were not on his flight logs or his infamous “little black book” of contacts. One of these individuals is the renowned linguist, political commentator and critic of capitalism and empire, Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky, who has previously discussed the Epstein case in interviews and who has maintained that Epstein’s ties to intelligence agencies should be considered a “conspiracy theory,” had not previously disclosed these meetings. Chomsky, when confronted by Journal reporters, was evasive, but ultimately admitted to meeting and knowing Jeffrey Epstein.

Many, largely on the left, have expressed dismay and confusion as to why someone with the political views of Chomsky would willingly meet, not once but several times, with someone like Jeffrey Epstein, particularly well after Epstein’s notoriety as a sex trafficker and pedophile. As this report will show, Epstein appeared to view Chomsky as another intellectual who could help guide his decisions when it came to his scientific obsessions – namely, transhumanism and eugenics. What Chomsky gained in return from meeting with Epstein isn’t as clear.

Why Did Chomsky Meet with Epstein?

According to the Journal, Chomsky’s meetings with Epstein took place during the years 2015 and 2016, while Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Chomsky told the Journal that he met with Epstein to discuss topics like neuroscience with other academics, like Harvard’s Martin Nowak (who was heavily funded by Epstein). On a separate occasion, Chomsky again met with Epstein alongside former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, allegedly to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.” A separate date saw Chomsky and his wife invited by Epstein to have dinner with him, Woody Allen and Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn. When asked about the dinner date with Woody Allen and Epstein, Chomsky referred to the occasion as “an evening spent with a great artist.”

When confronted with this evidence, Chomsky initially told the Journal that his meetings and relationship with Epstein were “none of your business. Or anyone’s.” He then added that “I knew him [Epstein] and we met occasionally.”

Before continuing further, it is important to note that aside from Epstein, both Ehud Barak and Woody Allen have been accused of having inappropriate sexual relationships with minors. For instance, Barak was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s residences in New York, so often that The Daily Beast reported that numerous residents of an apartment building linked to Epstein “had seen Barak in the building multiple times over the last few years, and nearly half a dozen more described running into his security detail,” adding that “the building is majority-owned by Epstein’s younger brother, Mark, and has been tied to the financier’s alleged New York trafficking ring.”

Specifically, several apartments in the building were “being used to house underage girls from South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union,” according to a former bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein’s main procurers of underage girls, Jean Luc Brunel. Barak is also known to have spent the night at one of Epstein’s residences at least once, was photographed leaving Epstein’s residence as recently as 2016, and has admitted to visiting Epstein’s island, which has sported nicknames including “Pedo Island,” “Lolita Island” and “Orgy Island.” In 2004, Barak received $2.5 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where Epstein was a trustee as well as one of the foundation’s top donors, officially for unspecified “consulting services” and “research” on the foundation’s behalf. Several years later, Barak put Harvey Weinstein in contact with the Israeli private intelligence outfit Black Cube, which employs former Mossad agents and Israeli military intelligence operatives, as Weinstein sought to intimidate the women who had accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

In addition, Barak previously chaired and invested in Carbyne911, a controversial Israeli emergency services start-up that has expanded around the world and has become particularly entrenched in the United States. Barak had directed Epstein to invest $1 million into that company, which has been criticized as a potential tool for warrantless mass surveillance. Leslie Wexner also invested millions in the company.

In Woody Allen’s case, he has been accused of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was 7 years old. That abuse claim has been corroborated by witnesses and other evidence. Furthermore, Allen refused to take a polygraph administered by state police in connection with the investigation and lost four exhaustive court battles related to child custody and his abuse of Dylan Farrow. One of the judge’s in the case described Allen’s behavior towards Dylan as “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.” Actress Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, alleged in court that Allen took a sexual interest in her adopted daughter when she was between the ages of two and three years old.

Allen subsequently “seduced” and later married another adopted daughter of Farrow’s, Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen first met when Previn was a child. However, Previn has stated that her first “friendly” interaction with Allen took place when she was a teenager. In 1992, Mia Farrow found nude photos of Previn in Allen’s home and has stated that this was her motive for ending her relationship with Allen.

In the case of Allen and Epstein, and potentially Barak as well, their sexual proclivities and scandals were well known by the time Chomsky met with these men, making a strong suggestion that this type of behavior was not seen by Chomsky as taboo or as a barrier to socialization. It is more likely than not that there was some other major draw that led Chomsky to overlook this type of horrendous behavior toward vulnerable minors.

In terms of reaching a deeper understanding about why Epstein would have been interested in Chomsky – and vice versa, it is important to review – not just the information recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, but also what Epstein himself said of Chomsky before his 2019 death. According to an interview conducted in 2017, but later published in 2019 when Epstein was a major news topic, Epstein openly stated that he had invited Chomsky to his townhouse and he also explicitly stated why he had done so. Oddly, this early acknowledgement of Epstein’s regarding his relationship with Chomsky was left out of the Journal’s recent report.

In that interview, which was conducted by Jeffrey Mervis and later published in Science, Epstein stated that following about Chomsky:

[…] Epstein readily admitted to asking prominent members of the scientific establishment to assess the potential contribution of these so-called outcasts [i.e. MIT students Epstein described as being “on the spectrum”].

“So, I had Jim Watson to the house, and I asked Watson, what does he think about this idea,” a proposal to study how the cellular mechanisms of plants might be relevant to human cancer. Watson is a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. “Likewise with [Noam] Chomsky on artificial intelligence,” he said, referring to one of the pioneers in the field.

In fact, Epstein expressed great respect for the opinions of these elder statesmen. “It’s funny to watch Noam Chomsky rip apart these young boys who talk about having a thinking machine,” Epstein noted. “He takes out a dagger and slices them, very kindly, into little shreds.”

Thus, per Epstein, his interest in inviting Chomsky to his house was explicitly related to the “artificial intelligence,” which was a major scientific interest of Epstein’s. This also provides a major clue as to how Chomsky and Epstein might have first been introduced.

Chomsky, Epstein and MIT

Chomsky is most widely viewed as a famous linguist, political commentator and critic of modern capitalism and imperialism. So, why did Epstein seek to meet with him instead on Artificial Intelligence matters?

Well, an admitted “friend” of both Chomsky’s and Epstein’s was the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Like Chomsky, Minsky was a long-time professor and academic at MIT. It is very possible that Minsky connected the two men, especially considering the fact that Epstein was a major donor to MIT. Epstein described himself as being “very close” to Minsky, who died in 2016, roughly a year after Epstein began meeting with Chomsky. Epstein also financed some of Minsky’s projects and Minsky, like Ehud Barak, was accused of sexually abusing the minors Epstein trafficked.

Chomsky’s views on linguistics and cognition, for those who don’t know, is based very much on evolutionary biology. Chomsky was also a pioneer in cognitive science, described as “a field aimed at uncovering the mental representations and rules that underlie our perceptual and cognitive abilities.” Some have described Chomsky’s concept of language as based on “the complexity of internal representation, encoded in the genome, and their maturation in light of the right data into a sophisticated computational system, one that cannot be usefully broken down into a set of associations.” A person’s “language faculty”, per Chomsky, should be seen as “part of the organism’s genetic endowment, much like the visual system, the immune system and the circulatory system, and we ought to approach it just as we approach these other more down-to-earth biological systems.”

Despite their friendship, Minsky greatly diverged with Chomsky in this view, with Minsky describing Chomsky’s views on linguistics and cognition as largely superficial and irrelevant. Chomsky later criticized the widely used approach with AI that focuses on statistical learning techniques to mine and predict data, which Chomsky argued was “unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.”

However, Chomsky’s views linking evolutionary biology/genetics with linguistics/cognition were notably praised by the aforementioned Martin Nowak, who had attended one of the meetings Epstein had with Chomsky. Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and head of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, later stated that he had “once broke out a blackboard during dinner with Epstein and, for two hours, gave a mathematical description of how language works,” further revealing that Epstein was interested in aspects of linguistics. It is unclear if this particular meeting was the same that Chomsky had attended alongside Nowak to discuss “neuroscience” and other topics.

However, given the importance of evolutionary biology and genetics to Chomsky’s theories, it is hardly surprising that Jeffrey Epstein would have gravitated more towards his views on AI than those of Minsky. Epstein was fascinated by genetics and, even per mainstream sources, was also deeply interested eugenics. Take for example the following from an article published in The Guardian in 2019:

Epstein was apparently fixated on “transhumanism”, the belief that the human species can be deliberately advanced through technological breakthroughs, such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

At its most benign, transhumanism is a belief that humanity’s problems can be improved, upgraded even, through such technology as cybernetics and artificial intelligence – at its most malignant though, transhumanism lines up uncomfortably well with eugenics.

Thus, Epstein’s interest in AI, genetics, and more was tied into his documented obsession with “transhumanism,” which – as several Unlimited Hangout reports have noted – is essentially a rebranding of eugenics. Indeed, the term transhumanism itself was first coined by Julian Huxley, the former president of the British Eugenics Society and the first head of UNESCO who called to make “the unthinkable thinkable again” with regards to eugenics.

Aside from transhumanism, Epstein also had an avowed interest in “strengthening” the human gene pool, in part by impregnating as many women as possible with his “seed” in order to widely disperse his genes. These views may also explain Epstein’s interest in associating himself with people like James (Jim) Watson. As noted earlier in this article, Epstein stated in 2017 that he had invited both Watson and Chomsky to his home on separate occasions.

Watson has been a controversial figures for years, particularly after he openly stated that people of African descent are genetically inferior and less intelligent than their European counterparts. He also previously promoted the idea that women should abort babies that carried a “gay gene,” were such a gene ever discovered. He also felt that gene editing should be used to make all women “prettier” and to eradicate “stupidity”. Notably, Watson made all of these comments well before Epstein invited him to his home.

Watson was also praised, controversially, after these same comments by another Epstein-funded scientist, Eric Lander. Lander, who was recently Biden’s top science advisor, was forced to resign from that post last year after being accused of harassing those who worked under him in the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Prior to joining the Biden administration, Lander had collaborated with Watson on the Human Genome Project and later ran the Broad Institute, a non-profit born out of collaboration between MIT and Harvard.

Returning to Chomsky, though he may not have been aware of Epstein’s interests in eugenics and transhumanism, it has since become clear that Epstein’s main interest in Artificial Intelligence – his stated purpose for courting Chomsky – was intimately tied to these controversial disciplines. However, Chomsky did know of Epstein’s past, and likely also knew of Woody Allen’s similar past before meeting him as well. He turned a blind eye on those matters, telling the Journal that Epstein had “served his sentence” and, as a result, had been granted a “clean slate”. In saying this, Chomsky is apparently unaware of Epstein’s controversial “sweetheart deal” that resulted in an extremely lenient sentence and non-prosecution agreement. That “deal” was signed off on by then-US Attorney Alex Acosta because Acosta was told to “back off” Epstein because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Chomsky had previously told several people, including an Unlimited Hangout reader, that an Epstein-intelligence agency connection is a “conspiracy theory.”

Given Chomsky’s odd views on Epstein’s past and the fact that Epstein frequently discussed transhumanism and eugenics around other prominent scientists, it is possible, though unproven, that Chomsky may have known more about Epstein’s true interests in AI and genetics.

Would Chomsky have been willing to overlook these ethical conundrums? Given his political views on capitalism and foreign policy, many would likely say that he would not. However, finding ways to circumvent these ethical conundrums with respect to AI may have been one of Epstein’s main reasons for heavily funding MIT, particularly its Media Lab. Epstein, in addition to his own donations, also funneled millions of dollars from Bill Gates and Leon Black to the Media Lab.

According to former Media Lab employee Rodrigo Ochigame, writing in The Intercept, Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab – who took lots of donations from Epstein and attempted to hide Epstein’s name on official records – was focused on developing “ethics” for AI that were “aligned strategically with a Silicon Valley effort seeking to avoid legally enforceable restrictions of controversial technologies.” Ito later resigned his post at the Media Lab due to fallout from the Epstein scandal.

Ochigame writes:

A key group behind this effort, with the lab as a member, made policy recommendations in California that contradicted the conclusions of research I conducted with several lab colleagues, research that led us to oppose the use of computer algorithms in deciding whether to jail people pending trial. Ito himself would eventually complain, in private meetings with financial and tech executives, that the group’s recommendations amounted to “whitewashing” a thorny ethical issue. “They water down stuff we try to say to prevent the use of algorithms that don’t seem to work well” in detention decisions, he confided to one billionaire.

I also watched MIT help the U.S. military brush aside the moral complexities of drone warfare, hosting a superficial talk on AI and ethics by Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and notorious war criminal, and giving input on the U.S. Department of Defense’s “AI Ethics Principles” for warfare, which embraced “permissibly biased” algorithms and which avoided using the word “fairness” because the Pentagon believes “that fights should not be fair.”

Ochigame also cites Media Lab colleagues who say that Marvin Minsky, who worked with the Lab before his death, was known to say that “an ethicist is someone who has a problem with whatever you have in your mind.” Also troubling is the fact that Ito, and by extension the Media Lab, played a role in shaping White House policy with respect to AI. For instance, Obama called Ito an “expert” on AI and ethics during an interview with him in 2016. Ito, on his conversation with Obama, said the following: “[…] the role of the Media Lab is to be a connective tissue between computer science, and the social sciences, and the lawyers, and the philosophers […] What’s cool is that President Obama gets that.”

If you are Jeffrey Epstein, with a history of illegal and criminal activity, and interested in avoiding the regulation of controversial technologies you feel are necessary to advance your vision of transhumanism/eugenics, financing groups that greatly influence “ethics” policies that helps limit the regulation of those technologies would obviously benefit you.

Ochigame goes on to write:

Thus, Silicon Valley’s vigorous promotion of “ethical AI” has constituted a strategic lobbying effort, one that has enrolled academia to legitimize itself. Ito played a key role in this corporate-academic fraternizing, meeting regularly with tech executives. The MIT-Harvard fund’s initial director was the former “global public policy lead” for AI at Google. Through the fund, Ito and his associates sponsored many projects, including the creation of a prominent conference on “Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency” in computer science; other sponsors of the conference included Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Notably, Epstein was tied into these same circles. He was very, very close, not just with Bill Gates, but with several other top Microsoft executives and was also known to have a close relationship with Google’s Sergey Brin, who has recently been subpoenaed in the Epstein-JPMorgan case, as well as Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Notably, many of these same companies are currently pioneering transhumanist technologies, particularly in healthcare, and are deeply tied to either the military or intelligence, if not both.

The MIT-AI-Military Connection

Chomsky is just one of several prominent academics and intellectuals who were courted by Epstein in an attempt to supercharge the development of technologies that could help bring his controversial obsessions to fruition. Notably, many of these characters, including Chomsky, have had their work – at one point or another – funded by the U.S. military, which has itself long been a major driver of AI research.

For example, Minsky and Danny Hillis, a close associate of Epstein’s in his own right, co-created a DARPA contractor and supercomputer firm called Thinking Machines, which was aimed at creating a “truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us,” according to one company brochure. Minsky was Hillis’ mentor at MIT and the pair sought out Sheryl Handler, who worked for a genetic-engineering start-up at Harvard called the Genetics Institute, to help them create their supercomputer firm.

Thinking Machines, which made poor business decisions routinely from the beginning, was only able to function for as long as it did due to multi-million dollar contracts it had secured from the Pentagon’s DARPA. With the close of Cold War, DARPA sought to use its clout with Thinking Machines to push the company to develop a product that could deal with things like modeling the global climate, mapping the human genome and predicting earthquakes. Subsequent reporting from the Wall Street Journal showed that the agency had been “playing favorites” and Thinking Machine’s “gravy train” abruptly ended due to the bad publicity, subsequently leading to the collapse of the company.

Hillis, around this time, met Jeffrey Epstein. The introduction may have been brokered by former Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, a friend of Hillis’ who grew close to Epstein in the 1990s and even took Epstein on an official Microsoft trip to Russia. Myhrvold, who was also named as an abuser of the minors Epstein trafficked, was one of the other top Microsoft officials who was close to Epstein beginning in the 1990s. Another was Linda Stone, who later connected Jeffrey Epstein to Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab. As previously mentioned, Epstein would later direct the long-time head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, to donate millions to the Media Lab.

Chomsky’s own history at MIT brought him into contact with the military. For instance, during the early 1960s, Chomsky received funding from the Air Force, which aimed to program a computer with Chomsky’s insights about grammar in an attempt to endow it “with the ability to recognize instructions imparted to it in perfectly ordinary English, thereby eliminating a necessity for highly specialized languages that intervene between a man and a computer.” Chomsky later stated of the military funding of his early career that “I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics.”

Chomsky has since denied that military funding shaped his linguistics work in any significant way and has claimed that the military is used by the government “as a kind of a funnel by which taxpayer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future.” However, reports have noted that this particular project was very much tied to military applications. In addition, the man who first recruited Chomsky to MIT in the mid-1950s, Jerome Wiesner, went on to be Chomsky’s boss at MIT for over 20 years as well as “America’s most powerful military scientist.”

To Chomsky’s credit, after this program ended, he became fully, and publicly, committed to anti-war activism. This activism led him, at one point, to consider resigning from MIT, which he declined to do – likely because he was rather quickly granted professorship. As Chris Knight writes, “this meant that instead of resigning, Chomsky’s choice was to launch himself as an outspoken anti-militarist activist even while remaining in one of the US’s most prestigious military labs.”

By staying at MIT, Chomsky chose to maintain his career, in relative proximity to the centers of power he would later become an icon for denouncing. However, it shows that Chomsky, from this time onward, began to make some choices that undermined his radicalism to an extent. Chomsky may have rationalized his decision to stay at MIT in the 1960s because it gave him a better platform from which to espouse his political and anti-war views. It is not unheard of for prominent public figures to make such compromises. However, in light of the recent Epstein revelations and what they appear to signal, it seems that Chomsky, particularly in his later years, may have become too comfortable and too willing to make these types of compromises – ones that a much younger Chomsky would have surely rejected.

Nightmare Fuel, A Conspiracy Crisis

Posted on December 3, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Part One: Mind-Control, Thought Implantation, and Telepathy Tech

By Equanimous Rex

Source: Modern Mythology

When technology can be produced that mimics diseases such as schizophrenia, or phenomena such as telepathy, how do we discern fact from fiction? When our memories are fallible, and when people can, over time with great repetition, replace true memories with false — where does this leave us?

“Is there anybody out there?”

One day when I was a child, I enthusiastically told my father that I could “talk, but in my head, where no one can hear me.” When my father replied that what I had described was called “thinking”, and that everyone does it, my heart dropped a bit. It seemed so interesting to me, and so banal to him. The world and my place in it were still mysteries to me, as for all children, and even the most mundane experiences seemed wondrous. I couldn’t blame him for what I saw as his lack of imagination.

I was a book worm and movie enthusiast, science-fiction and fantasy. A few years later, while watching Star Trek: TNG, I realized that mind control and telepathy were a re-occuring theme. There were so many examples of mind altering technology within the series that it reawakened this childhood curiosity, and a fear.

“What if people really could read my thoughts?” I wondered. What if people could control them?

I wasn’t exactly concerned. It was just a childish fancy, something that gets under our skin, but we have already developed the reality testing to maintain it as a hypothetical. A popular trope meant to freak us out. Right? Even before science fiction tried to make mind control tech seem plausible, we spun tales about thoughts and desires altered at a distance, or clandestinely acquired information garnered from supernatural sources. Our inner voice has been a source of anxiety for virtual eons, after all, if someone can control it, how can we trust it?

Just fiction, right? Well, yes and no.

This series will explore some of these connections…

“Everybody’s Out To Get You Motherfucker”

I was mildly religious back in the day, a non-denominational flavor of generic Christian. I should have noticed the similarity between how I felt about fictional mind-control and telepathy, and how I felt about the idea of God watching every thought or move I made. That feeling of having no privacy, of having inner thoughts and opinions weighed out and measured, and judged. Or maybe even manipulated directly. Somehow, I never made a link between the idea of an omniscient deity reading all my thoughts and judging my eternal soul, and telepathy as found in science-fiction and fantasy.

At least, not as a child.

Now I understand the can of worms we are opening. As we will see through the rest of this series, through the fusion of global disinformation, technology that can beam voices into your mind by vibrating the tiny bones in your ear, and the ever-present hum of all ideologies vying for you to attribute those voices to their cause, we’re quickly approaching a semantic apocalypse. This sounds crazy, I know. That’s kind of the point. Imagine you’re hearing a voice in your head that is telling you to kill all the Jews, or that Obama is the Antichrist, and then you open Twitter to find the President is amplifying that paranoia. That’s a hell of force multiplier for mass insanity. Anyone who has watched the news recently should understand how deadly serious this epistemic crisis is.

Let’s begin with “the crazy.” Who hasn’t heard of people wearing “tin-foil hats”? Usually a pejorative allusion to someone who has bought into conspiracy theory, the first recorded idea of a telepathy-blocking device can actually be found in the strange non-fiction book Atomic Consciousness: An Explanation of Ghosts, Spiritualism, Witchcraft, Occult Phenomena and all Supernormal Manifestations written by self-proclaimed seer John Palfrey in 1909, under the name “James Bathurst”. He posited a hypothetical “insulative electrical contrivance encircling the head during thought” for use against “telepathic impactive impingement”.

The first allusion to a “foil-hat” specifically used to block telepathy comes from Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, who wrote a short science-fiction story titled “The Tissue-Culture King” (1926), in which a hat made of foil is used to block others from reading the protagonist’s mind.

Philip K. Dick, a popular science fiction writer, was himself beset by strange visions that he assumed were some kind of transmission. Much of his fiction revolves around the dissociation, cognitive dissonance, and paranoia of psychosis, drug-induced or otherwise: forms of invasion, disruption of thought-privacy, and personal autonomy. And the day-to-day experience of living in the techno-authoritarian world we are coming to inhabit.

The tale of Dick’s experience is too long to go into here, and not the focus of the article, but if you’re interested you can find information about it online. There’s even a comic that details the reported experience. I’d like to focus in on a particular quote from Dick’s retelling of the experience. The quote is from a 1979 interview with author and journalist Charles Platt. Dick discusses his confusion about whether he thought the “transmissions” were a supernatural (“God”) or technological (“the Russians”) phenomena.

“On Thursdays and Saturdays I’d think it was God,” he told Platt. “On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’d think it was extraterrestrials. Some times I’d think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmissions.”

You can find the interview audio (here).

Let’s consider both.

“ Very Superstitious, Wash Your Face and Hands”

The trope of mind-control or telepathy is not one of modern invention. We can find examples of telepathy, and the various kinds of abuses it would entail, in folklore and mythology spanning centuries.

Readers familiar with Buddhism, particularly Japanese Buddhism, might know the term “satori”, which translates roughly to “comprehension; understanding”. However, there is another “satori”, a folkloric yōkai, a class of spirits or demon. The satori “monster” was said to be able to read people’s minds, and would then speak their thoughts aloud faster than the thinker could think them.

Another example of mind-control can be found in European folklore about witches. The Malleus Malificarum, a 15th century book on witch-hunting written by German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, lists several ways in which a devil or witch may “enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt” and “the Method by which Devils through the Operations of Witches sometimes actually possess men.”

From the Malleus Malificarum:

“From this it is concluded that, since devils operates there where they are, therefore when they confuse the fancy and the inner perceptions they are existing in them. Again, although to enter the soul is possible only to God Who created it, yet devils can, with God’s permission, enter our bodies; and they an then make impressions on the inner faculties corresponding to the bodily organs. And by those impressions the organs are affected in proportion as the inner perceptions are affected in the way which has been shown: that the devil can draw out some image retained in a faculty corresponding to one of the senses; as he draws from the memory, which is in the back part of the head, an image of a horse, and locally moves that phantasm to the middle part of the head, where are the cells of imaginative power; and finally to the sense of reason, which is in the front of the head. And he causes such a sudden change and confusion, that such objects are necessarily thought to be actual things seen with the eyes.”

And of course, among countless other examples, there’s also the Abrahamic God with his alleged omniscience:

“12 For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. 13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Hebrews 4:12–13 New International Version

“What I am is a control freak
I’ll infiltrate your life”

So whether in science-fiction, religion, or folklore, we can see that humanity has had anxieties about autonomy and privacy of thought for some time. But whether or not you believe in supposed psychic powers and the like, there remains the matter of self-fulfilling prophecies. We find inspiration from fiction, and in the case of weapons and warfare, developing technology specifically to frighten and confuse the targets, in addition to dealing physical harm. This is one of the many ways that fiction is written into reality. Given the role of reality television in politics at this time, we can probably imagine many more.

Where did this begin? There were probably many points of modern origin. But the most well known was MKULTRA was the code name for a now well-known series of declassified CIA experiments involving the use of psychotropic drugs and various techniques to coerce confessions from suspects, and yes, attempted mind-control. More books and articles than I can count have been written on this topic, so I mention it only as a reference point. While the project was ultimately deemed a failure by heavily-involved Sidney Gottlieb (chemist and employee of the CIA at the time of MKULTRA), it provides an example of real-world attempts at harnessing the mythological power of mind-control, a failed experiment that resulted in real casualties.

On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a scientist and CIA employee, jumped from a building and killed himself. Years later, the government admitted to his family that he had been covertly given LSD by his supervisor within the CIA just before the suicide. Later, it was uncovered that the CIA was at the time dosing people without their consent to further their MKULTRA experiments. This has been well dramatized on the recent Netflix series Wormwood, but it is only one small piece of the CIA programs that grew out of the cold war conflict, such as Operation Midnight Climax, which by name alone is begging to be turned into another series.

Then there’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Defense responsible for developing emerging technologies to be used by the U.S. Armed Forces. According to WIRED journalist Sharon Weinerberger’s 2007 article, DARPA is trying to develop what they call “hypersound”.

“The goal of the Sonic Projector program is to provide Special Forces with a method of surreptitious audio communication at distances over 1 km. Sonic Projector technology is based on the non-linear interaction of sound in air translating an ultrasonic signal into audible sound. The Sonic Projector will be designed to be a man-deployable system, using high power acoustic transducer technology and signal processing algorithms which result in no, or unintelligible, sound everywhere but at the intended target. The Sonic Projector system could be used to conceal communications for special operations forces and hostage rescue missions, and to disrupt enemy activities.” (Emphasis mine)

The Modern Mythology-adjacent publication Narrative Machines includes some of the details of how and why DARPA is interested in analyzing language and memes in particular.

The interests of organizations seeking to manipulate obviously spans scales and contexts, from global sentiment analysis and manipulation, persona management, and enhancing battlefield awareness. All of these technologies point toward the kind of world we will soon inhabit.

“Everything Is Under Control”

It isn’t only that people are looking for ways to implant thoughts, mind-control, or utilize what amounts to telepathy; we are also starting to realize just how unreliable our memories and perceptions are to begin with — how much of a narrative it is, and a fiction at that. What we consider a closed-off, private space — our minds — actually turns out to be more like a sponge. Porous, an open system with influx and efflux. Liable to fallibility, and exploitation.

There’s a term for when people assume everything they perceive and remember is accurate and accurately depicts the world: naive realism. Its counterpoint is indirect realism, also known as cognitive representationalism.

Indirect realism posits that we cannot have a direct perception of the world, instead we interpret our mental representations of the world. If you doubt cognitive representationalism, simply look at any of the number of “illusion” art pieces on the Internet. (Here are a few examples.)

If naive realism were entirely correct, then there would be no illusions. It’s pretty much that simple. Since there are illusions, we can assume naive realism is somewhat incorrect, even though it is both natural and intuitive for humans to be naive realists. This “intuition” has played a major part in events ranging from the Satanic Panic of the 90’s to reports of individuals under hypnosis “remembering” alien abductions.

Surprisingly, hypnosis has a history of working, though not as intended. A far cry from how it is depicted in fiction — spin the wheel, use the pendulum, get mind-controlled slaves, etc — hypnosis seems to be more applicable as a false-memory implantation technique, or a means of otherwise putting ourselves into a suggestible state.

Dr. Joseph Green, professor of psychology at Ohio State co-authored a study in which people were warned that going under hypnosis could create false memories, or as he calls them “pseudomemories”, found that more than quarter of the participants acquired the false memories anyway.

According to Green, “There’s a cultural expectation that hypnosis will lead to more accurate and earlier memories, but that’s not true.’’

And: “The results suggest that warnings are helpful to some extent in discouraging pseudomemories” […] “Warnings did not prevent pseudomemories and did not reduce the confidence subjects had in those memories.’’ […] “Most research supports the claim that our memories typically begin around age 3 or 4, so it seems quite unlikely that these very early memories actually happened at the stated time. Many people believe that hypnosis can lead to earlier memories, although that has never been shown to be true. People’s expectations about what hypnosis can do will influence what they remember.’’

Elizabeth F. Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory, is known for her work on the “misinformation effect”. She gained notoriety because she suggested that people were capable of accidentally fabricating memories, and for advocating for people convicted of crimes based on eye-witness testimony when such testimony seemed to fall under false-memory syndrome. Her work has been considered both controversial and ground-breaking.

One troubling example is the wrongful conviction of Steve Titus. On October 12, 1980, a teenage girl was raped while hitchhiking. She provided various details on her assailant when she later called the police. The victim later picked Titus out a line-up (both her assailant and he had beards) and his car was the same color as the one the victim described. Titus did not have a three-piece suit (which was one of the details given to police) and his car had several differences to that of the car described by the victim.

Originally only saying that Titus “most resembled” the man who had raped her, the victim eventually declared she was certain it was Titus. This was what led Elizabeth Flotus to get involved in the case upon request, suspicious that this followed the “modus operandi” of false-memory syndrome.

Titus was then convicted of the rape and sent to prison. Eventually, police caught the actual perpetrator, a serial rapist named Edward Lee King, who later confessed to the rape of the hitchhiking teenager while in police custody.

The case of Steve Titus is considered, looking back, an abortion of justice, and wrongful imprisonment. Titus would go on to sue the police department involved in the investigation, but died of a heart attack before the case went to court. The police officer Titus accused of planting evidence — a similar brown folder to that which the victim described in her assailants car was found in Titus’s vehicle, but he denied ever seeing it — died six years later himself of a heart attack.

“Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody’s false memory. In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people, 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn’t do. They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory.” Loftus said in a TED talk discussion on false-memory.

“Worse Than Yesterday”

These various uncertainties about the privacy and ultimate agency of our thoughts are only one part of the epistemic crisis I’ve outlined. A broader view can be found in the unmooring effect of a consumer-tech society itself. Author and philosopher RS Bakker wrote a blog post in 2011 that is showing itself quite prescient, “What Is The Semantic Apocalypse?”, in which he wrote,

The result of this heterogeniety is a society lacking any universal meaning-based imperatives: all the ‘shoulds’ of a meaningful life are either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared biology: our fears and hungers. Thus, consumer society, the efficient organization of humans around the facts of their shared animality.

In biological terms, my fear is that the Semantic Apocalypse is about to happen. Despite the florid diversity of answers to the Question of Meaning, they tend to display a remarkable degree of structural convergence. This is what you would expect, given that we are neurologically wired for meaning, to look at the world in terms of intent, purpose, and propriety. Research in this last, the biology of morality, has found striking convergences in moral thought across what otherwise seem vast cultural chasms.

He continues,

The million dollar question is really one of what happens once that shared neurophysiology begins to fragment, and sharing imperatives becomes a matter of coincidence. It has to be madness, one that will creep upon us by technological degrees.

Why does it have to be madness? Because we define madness according what our brains normally do. Once we begin personalizing our brains, ‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful. ‘Insanity’ will simply be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it will all look like insanity.

James Curcio and I are currently exploring this premise (among other things) in the Fallen Cycle web-comic BLACKOUT. Beginning with the false memories and blank spaces of drug blackouts and half-remembered dreams, where we all agree on the extent of our uncertainty, this can so quickly be expanded to all our seemingly waking and sober states.

Sometimes, people acquire false memories on their own, to be sure. But they are just as likely to be goaded one way or the other, depending on their suggestibility, to remember things inquired about by a well-meaning therapist unconsciously guiding them towards a particular recollection. In fact, there is no reason to suspect that people don’t intentionally try to implant false memories and associations via suggestion into other people. That is, after all, the bread and butter of advertising and politics.

Gas-lighting is a popular topic (and activity) on the Internet. While it’s usage has changed somewhat with popular adoption, gas-lighting refers to a concentrated effort to use psychological manipulation to convince someone their sanity, memories, and perception are inaccurate even though in reality, they are accurate. This is only one of an incredibly large toolkit available for global psychic warfare. When amplified through the reach and precision of targeted social media and media echo chambers alone, the most basic school-yard psychological tactics can be devastatingly effective.

Humanity has concerned about the privacy of their minds for centuries, if not longer. We’re concerned that our minds, or our hearts, as mentioned in the Bible, will be laid bare in front of others (supernatural or mortal) to judge. Or even worse, that we may be invaded, made to do things against our wills, controlled. The scrutiny of the Palantir is only the most recent form of this anxiety.

This anxiety comes from a real place. Despite ideological, religious, or philosophical models that state the contrary, I believe we’ve always known on some level our minds are open-systems. This is indicated by anxieties about mind-control and telepathy spanning centuries, across cultures, found in many instances of folk-lore, religion, and mythology. That, no matter how much we might declare ourselves possessing metaphysical free-will, there is an intuitive understanding that we can be manipulated, that our wills can be forced or coerced without our even knowing. That freedom is fleeting when we can’t actually know ourselves. Being forced to confront our “open” minds leaves some of us aghast in cognitive dissonance, only to double down on faith in metaphysical free-will and total autonomy of thought.

Governments, corporations, in truth any group with suitable funding and desire, have taken these human anxieties, as old as humanity itself, and used them as a blueprint with which to forge a new generation of psycho-weaponry, to use on whomever they like.

Once you’ve weaponized insanity, you kick out the legs of people’s grasp on reality. Nobody is sure anymore whether they are ill or being attacked. Genuine insanity is getting reaffirmed, actualized, even actively funded, while the most sane and sober are paralyzed by self-doubt. The implications of a world with these sorts of technologies being used are far-reaching, and the damage it will do to people’s sense of security in the world, of their perceptions, is likely to cause unintended side-effects.

Much of our response to the development of these technologies will be long-overdue. Will they force us to face ourselves, our fallible minds, and those around us who utilize these cognitive exploits as weapons or means of control?

… Or will we just go off the deep end?

Consider a control situation: ten people in a lifeboat. two armed self-appointed leaders force the other eight to do the rowing while they dispose of the food and water, keeping most of it for themselves an doling out only enough to keep the other eight rowing. The two leaders now need to exercise control to maintain an advantageous position which they could not hold without it. Here the method of control is force — the possession of guns. Decontrol would be accomplished by overpowering the leaders and taking their guns. This effected, it would be advantageous to kill them at once. So once embarked on a policy of control, the leaders must continue the policy as a matter of self-preservation. Who, then, needs to control others but those who protect by such control a position of relative advantage? Why do they need to exercise control? Because they would soon lose this position and advantage and in many cases their lives as well, if they relinquished control. […]

Extending the lifeboat analogy to the Ship of State, few existing governments could withstand a sudden, all-out attack by all their underprivileged citizens, and such an attack might well occur if the intentions of certain existing governments were unequivocally apparent. Suppose the lifeboat leaders had built a barricade and could withstand a concerted attack and kill all eight of the rowers if necessary. They would then have to do the rowing themselves and neither would be safe from the other. Similarly, a modern government armed with heavy weapons and prepared for attack could wipe out ninety-five percent of its citizens. But who would do the work, and who would protect them from the soldiers and technicians needed to make and man the weapons? Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary. This is achieved through various techniques of psychological control, also balanced. The techniques of both force and psychological control are constantly improved and refined, and yet worldwide dissent has never been so widespread or so dangerous to the present controllers. — “The Limits of Control,” William S. Burroughs.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Julian Huxley