LSD, Mind Control, and the
Internet: A Chronology
1942: The Cerebral Inhibition Meeting,
sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, organized by Frank Fremont-Smith. Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and five
others members of the (later) Cybernetics Group attended. Meeting focused on "physiological
mechanisms underlying the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and hypnosis as
related to the problem of cerebral inhibition."
Long
Island Biological Laboratories research project, headed by Harold Abramson,
established in part with Macy funds, and with support from the War
Department. Abramson was then a Major
in the Technical Division, Chemical Warfare service.
1945: Vannever Bush's
"memex." Bush directs the
work at Los Alamos, where John von Neumann is one of the few scientists with
full knowledge of the project's purpose.
von Neuman later helps to select the target sites for the bomb-drop in
Japan, becomes a critical theorist of the hydrogen bomb, and a principal
strategist of MAD, the war-game based cold-war military strategy. He also puts in critical work on the idea of
a general-purpose computer, helps to develop ENIAC, and became one of the
organizing forces in the Cybernetics Group.
A consultant to Standard Oil, IBM, Atomic Energy Commission, Air Force,
Los Alamos Labs, and the CIA, among others.
Also central to the development of the idea of neural nets, the
conceptual forerunner of the internet.
1946: First meeting of the conference on
Feedback Mechanisms in Biology and the Social Sciences, later dubbed the
Cybernetics group.
1947: Project Chatter--Navy program focused
on mescaline and other substances; sparked by reports of amazing results in the
Soviet Union with "truth drugs." (Senate Report) This project ended in 1953.
Around
this same time, a German researcher named Hoffman synthesizes LSD and
experiments with it on himself.
Formation
of the RAND corporation by the Air Force, institutionalizing the applications
of mathematics to war. John von Neumann
becomes a consultant for RAND.
1948: Invention of the first general-purpose
computer, in England, by FC Williams
(de Landa)
Founding
of the World Federation for Mental Health (Mead, Frank, Fremont-Smith, Macy
funding, with others): "to some who feared communist world revolution,
world mental health seemed a welcome liberal alternative ideology." (Heims)
late 40s: Development
of transistor at Bell labs by Shockley
1950: Project Bluebird (later became Project
Artichoke): goals were to find out how
to condition agency personnel against interrogation, to investigate
interrogation techniques, memory enhancement.
Office of Scientific Intelligence coordinated with Technical Services
division of the CIA; program continued until some time in the late 50s.
1951: Sandoz pharmaceuticals, a Swiss
company, agrees to an exclusive contract with the US Government to deliver 100
grams a week of LSD, and not to provide any to communist countries.
1953: Project MKULTRA initiated at the CIA,
at the suggestion of Richard Helms, then an assistant director. Project continued at least until 1963;
almost all records of the project were destroyed, at the direction of Helms, in
1973, when Senate investigations of the CIA began closing in on this
subject. MKULTRA was specifically
designed to explore the use of mind- and behavior-altering substances as part
of global strategic intelligence warfare.
MKULTRA, in its final phase, "involved surreptitious administration
[of LSD] to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by
undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA." (Senate Report).
Harold
Abramson proposes to the CIA an $85,000 study of the effects of LSD on
unwitting hospital patients. Funding
for this project was funneled through the Macy Foundation.
Scientists
working with SOD (CIA) administer LSD to one another; one of these, Dr. Olson,
is permanently affected and later jumps out of a window (?) in a Washington DC
hotel while under the care of a CIA handler.
Harold Abramson is the attending physician. A year later, Abramson publishes the first of several articles
dealing with the effects of LSD on Siamese fighting fish. Abramson was an allergist and pediatrician. He was also responsible, during the 1950s,
for turning on many of the Cybernetics group to LSD, including Frank
Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy foundation and organizer of the LSD conferences
(first of these held in 1959).
1954: Lily Pharmaceuticals, with CIA
funding, discovers how to synthesize LSD, ending US dependence on foreign
supply.
late 50s: Paul
Baran at RAND corporation begins to develop a communications system capable of
withstanding a nuclear war.
CIA
arranges cut-out contracts with The Geschikter Foundation, the Josiah Macy
Foundation, and the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, for
human-subjects tests on LSD.
The
Army Chemical Corps. administers LSD to 1000 American soldiers
("volunteers") who then participated in a series of tests concerning
battlefield performance. 95
"volunteers" were subsequently tested to evaluate the potential of
LSD as an intelligence weapon. These
tests were actually hidden from the CIA.
1959: Gorman annex at Georgetown built with
a CIA wing for testing human subjects.
Geshickter Foundation is the cutout; Dr. Geshickter's foundation funded
LSD experiments on terminally ill patients and on federal prisoners. Geshickter's foundation funneled more than 2
million dollars to other Institutions, many of them universities, from the late
50s until the early 70s.
Macy-funded
first international "LSD therapy" conference.
1960: Invention of the Silicon chip by Jack
Kilby
1962: The Army chemical corps.' Project
Third Chance and Derby Hat, involve the involuntary testing of American
military personnel and foreign nationals, respectively, at overseas sites. These projects were also (unsuccessfully)
concealed from the CIA.
mid 60s: Ted
Nelson coins "hypertext"
1968: First annual symposium of the American
Society for Cybernetics. Symposium
Proceedings entitled "Purposive Systems."
Mead,
from symposium proceedings: "I have just lived through a conference where
I found myself wishing nostalgically for the dear old days of the late 1930s,
when the only people one had to worry about were communists who had clearly
defined goals which were different from your own..... But in this recent conference
there were groups of young people whose only goals was to disrupt, who called
meetings and then discussed in public such questions as whether they should
stay in the conference and subvert it or walk out and get more publicity. When one asked what their aim was, they had
no answer, only a loose rationale of the desirability of disrupting all the
establishments, even the ones they had themselves created...."
Doug
Engelbart introduces computer researchers at a conference near San Francisco to
the graphical user interface (computer screen with windows), and to the mouse,
transforming the "computer display into the surface of contact, the
interface between human and machine. At
the same time, Engelbart's "augmentation laboratory" (ARPA funded)
began to use the computer as a means of human-to-human interaction, with
primitive electronic mail, collective journals, and group interaction. (de
Landa)
1969: First node of ARPANET is installed at
UCLA
1970: The Mansfield Act prohibits DARPA funding
of projects without direct military applications.
1971: Migration of people interested in
interactive (vs. batch-processed) computing to the new Xerox PARC. PARC subsequently perfects the mouse and
windows, develops bitmapped graphics, assembles the first personal computer,
the ALTO. These products never reach
market through Xerox, but spin off into the work of hackers.
1988: Morris' internet worm paralyzes the
internet, including RAND.
Notes:
Emmanel Mesthene, Harvard
University, "How Technology will Shape the Future," from
"Purposive Systems" (1968):
"Social
consequences are surely not uniquely and univocally determined by the character
of [technological] innovation, but they cannot be entirely independent of that
character and still be consequences.
What the advent of nuclear weapons altered was the military
organization of the country, not the structure of its communications industry;
and the launching of satellites affects international relations much more
directly than it does the institutions of organized sport."
Herbert Anschutz, Consulting
Scientist, German ministry of defense, "Psychocybernetics of Intelligent
Behavior," from "Purposive Systems":
"It
is interesting to note that social systems which do not receive new information
from the outside must have a constant eneidy content [that is, a constant
stimulus-response quotient], and the equivalence point of those systems is
characterized by an extreme value of Shannon's information content or
redundancy....in every case, learning means an increase of redundancy. If there is no further possibility of
increasing the redundancy by external communication or internal data
processing, nothing more can be learned."
David Hawkins, University of
Colorado, "The Nature of Purpose," from "Purposive Systems":
In
an essay published posthumously in 1952, the American Engineer-novelist, Hans
Storm, undertakes to contrast two principles of human workmanship. One he calls the principle of design, and
the other, by a "slightly bastard etymology," the principle of
eolithism.... The designer must first know approximately what he wants and how
it is to be used. Next is a choice of
building material which must be of known, and as far as possible, of uniform properties. This certainty as to what his objective is
and this uniformity of materials are essential to the whole process.... Storm
wishes to challenge an assumption that comes with the principle of design in
our society, namely that this principle is basic and universal....To challenge
this assumption, Storm, a professional designer himself, puts forth an
alternative, a wholly different principle of workmanship for which he borrows
the term eolithism.... An eolith is
literally a piece of junk remaining from the Stone Age....accidentally adapted to
some end and, more importantly, strongly suggestive of that end. We may imagine the person whom the
anthropologists describe so formidably by the name of man, strolling
along in a stonefield, fed, contented, thinking preferably about nothing at
all--for these are the conditions favorable to the art--when his eye lights
perchance on a stone just possibly suitable for a spearhead. That instant, the
project, the very idea of the spear, originates.... [The designer] ust know what he wants and, even before the design
begins, he must decide on his material.
The fashioner of eoliths, on the other hand, must have a continually
open mind about materials and he must be very adaptable in the matter of ends
of what he wants. If the eolith defies
the use it first suggested, then, perhaps, there is another use equally
interesting and worthy. The essential
limitations of the principle of design lie in the givenness and fixity of
goals, and the need to eliminate variety and heterogeneity from the means and
materials; they are thereby reduced in any significance or value they may have,
except in serving those given ends.
A characteristic of eolithic craftsmanship is that it never goes twice
the same, and therefore, uniform procedures, theories of design, and so forth,
are of very little use.