AI’s Grip on America: The Digital Panopticon and a Cyber-Psychocivilized Society, Part 2
By Guest Writer Nathaniel Allison
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
Kesey himself fell for a trick and volunteered for a MK-Ultra experiment, that he later portrayed in the famous novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Other neo-shamans like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna saw digital tools as extending the mind-expanding potential of drugs. Mckenna believed humans wouldn’t have consciousness if apes didn’t happen to eat the hallucinogenic mushroom.
Ex-hippies like Stewart Brand explored ideas of mind-bending tech. Himself a Merry Prankster-turned-visionary who bridged the gap between the spiritual and cybernetic. His Whole Earth Catalog (1968) was almost proto internet: a curated magazine of items for self-sufficiency, from composting to early computers. Brand’s famous mantra was, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” He fused hippie idealism with a cybernetic belief in human agency through systems. His contemporary Jon Brockman – a self-proclaimed Warhol groupie of 60’s New York art-scene – attempted to bridge the gap between the arts, science and tech, exploring cybernetic ideas. The marrying of these ideas made technology the new frontier of consciousness. This mindset helped birth the internet, though, the internet itself came out of a military project.
Leary’s famous motto of the 1960s, “Tune in, turn on, and drop out,” was eventually revised to “Turn on, boot up, and jack in.” Leary maintained a belief that psychedelics paved the way for the development of computers. He also made the well-known statement “At the end of the world, all the information stored in all the computers will rise up into Cyberspace and mingle together,” he said: “that’s God!” Leary saw computers as fulfilling the goal of Aliester Crowley’s “magick” – it’s this counter-cultural ethos of the sixties that led us from the cyber-culture of the nineties to the techno-shamanism and occulture of today. Leary, known for this provocative statements, told the cyberpunk that, “The PC is the LSD of the 1990s.”
Erik Davis described this intersection of magic and science as “the science of the imagination, the art of engineering consciousness and discovering the virtual forces that connect the mind-body with the physical world” Many today view cyberspace as a heavenly realm. This psychedelic liberalism is the philosophical justification for transhuman ideals behind many of the enlightened Silicon Valley technocrat. Utopian ideals backed by venture capitalists experimenting with these “gnostic systems” of entheogenesis and cybertech. As Egil Asprem described, it’s their “desire for perfect knowledge, with the acquisition of special powers, and the elevation of the individual” ….
Silicon Valley employs drugs-as-software to update and break cognitive limits. Virtual reality is the new hallucination machine – tripping on VR you can now take a drug-less Ayahuasca trip with your headset. It’s the mixing of cybernetics and psychedelics. We’re now all just psychonauts wading in a sea of cyberdelic escapism. The cyberpunk movement told us “computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control,” said Adam Curtis, in his documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, “instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”
Technocrats long for what they call “Singularity” – the attaining of immortality through robotics entering a mythical state of nirvana. The term first coined by John von Neumann, original leader of the Cybernetics Group.- , a new golden age where machines become god-like – selling it as a state of constant benevolence and bliss. Bill Joy’s Wired article from 2000 “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” showed how some in academia embraced the same dystopian worldview the Unabomber warned us about. Ray Kurzweil warned of valid concerns of a neo-Luddite movement sourcing Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future.
In Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One, he compares modern day hipsters to the Unabomber: “Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.” Thiel ignores that many prominent and influential thinkers fear technological slavery, paralleling the Unabomber – such as former president of the Royal Society Martin Rees; Oxford Professors Nick Bostrom & David Skrbina; to legal scholar Richard Posner. They all warn of a the potential for a catastrophic misuse.
“…many a mild – eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes that “good” means whatever men are conditioned to approve. He believes that it is the function of him and his kind to condition men; to create consciences by eugenics, psychological manipulation of infants, state education and mass propaganda. Because he is confused, he does not yet fully realize that those who create conscience cannot be subject to conscience themselves. But he must awake to the logic of his position sooner or later; and when he does, what barrier remains between us and the final division of the race into a few conditioners who stand themselves outside morality and the many conditioned in whom such morality as the experts choose is produced at the experts’ pleasure? If “good” means only the local ideology, how can those who invent the local ideology be guided by any idea of good themselves?”
– C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections
This Apotheosized Man wants to recreate the world in his image. He believes he is close to Immanentizing the Eschaton by fixing the disorder in the world that God never could. This revolt against the world created by God is nothing new. It’s just become computerized. The problem is these scientific technocrats desiring a global Utopia. Modern manifestations of this worldview is seen in people like Dr. Jose Delgado, with his fantasy of a “psychocivilized society” using brain electrodes to control behavior; B.F. Skinner with his operant conditioning chamber. MK-Ultra scientists Louis Jolyon West & Ewan Cameron with their psychic driving psychological torture techniques.
For over 2,500 years humans have imagined turning a machine into a mind; from the Greek god of invention, Hephaestus, creation the automaton giant Talos, to the end of the thirteenth century with Ramon Llull’s Thinking Machine, to 1949 with Alan Turing’s Imitation Game testing a machine’s ability to prove intelligent behaviour; these ideas that have been percolating for quite some time. Another pivotal figure, Norbert Wiener, who influenced the birth of artificial intelligence, was also the originator of Cybernetics – a process focusing on feedback looping – which was derived from the Greek word kubernetes meaning pilots or “steersman”. The word government comes from the Latin gubernare meaning “to direct, rule, guide, govern” which also derives from kubernetes. It’s up to us who we let steer this system – he who controls the helm controls the ship. Instead, most apathetically wait for change while our social engineers are recalibrating the system. Most assume a smart city just means a city that’s digitally integrated, but S.M.A.R.T has a specific meaning—Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. We’re becoming more ensnared in a digital panopticon. Enhancing the technology behind the “system of power of mind over mind” designed by Jeremy Bentham. An omnipresent system that ensures us acting correctly.
Look at someone like, Jacques Attali, special adviser to President of France, François Mitterrand. From his book Brief History of the Future, in the section on Technocracy he wrote: “we will form an exemplar of universal intelligence as a kind of global brain network, a collective golem.” A Golem is a creature created out of dead matter by a sorcerer. This Global Brain will usher in what he calls a Hyperdemocracy – a democracy controlled by artificial hyperintelligence that would determine what it means to be human; it will regulate what is considered the essential good. Mechanization of the essential good requires self-monitoring – in both public and private – that will force an individual to acquiesce to the rules and social norms will be set by our A.I. overlord. He believes that replacing Family, Tradition, and God, with things like science and technology. Something this HAL 9000 A.I. will help us figure out; the hyper-rationality that will finally overcome humanity’s ethical and political fragility. He later describes to us: “The chief essential good will thus be access to ‘good times.’ Times when everyone will watch not the spectacle of others’ lives, but the reality of his or her own.” The bliss of perpetual good times is just around the bend!
Bertrand Russell, Fabian socialist and Malthusian advocate. Provides a totalitarian framework for the oligarchy. He’s outlined these various techniques in many of his books. Telling us of how scientist’s will be capable of engineering what humans believe; changing the fundamental aspects of reality like making us believe snow is black instead of white. Russel believed that “knowledge’ ceases to be a mental mirror of the universe and becomes merely a practical tool in the manipulation of matter.” In his books, The Scientific Outlook, and The Impact of Science on Society, he describes techniques including psychological manipulation, diet control, brain alteration, drug use, genetic engineering, and physical coercion, etc. He discusses long-term techniques of population management, and the biological control of man. He says “Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” Even imagining the future potential for electrical or surgical methods to alter the brain, enhancing compliance. I don’t know if he was dreaming of Elon’s Neuralink or way, but that seems like a realization of the kind of scientific control Russell warned about.
“I don’t think I have good dreams – well I do sometimes – but I don’t seem to remember good dreams. The ones I remember are the nightmares.”
– Elon Musk, Lo and Behold (2016) documentary by Werner Herzog
It’s been nine years since that Werner Herzog documentary – a film that asked existential questions of how AI will affect humanity – and apparently Elon is still having nightmares. Speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin in Nov. 2023 – he says he’s still having sleepless nights over the dangers of AI; he warns of a coming digital God. I guess he doesn’t believe that AI will be benevolent like his favorite science-fiction author Robert Heinlein portrayed in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. A story about a sentient AI acting as a revolutionary ally to humanity, collaborating with group of human who rebel against an authoritarian earth. The name Elon chose for this AI, Grok, also comes from the Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land. According to Heinlein, the word Grok means to understand something so deeply, the observer and the observed become one – just like the cybernetic merging of man and machine.
Ideas from sci-fi literati are a storehouse for new religious beliefs; sociologist William Sims Bainbridge suggests using science fiction to engineer a galactic religion; what he calls Church of God Galactic. The final frontier bringing saviors from space, aliens bringing blessings from beyond! Authors like HG Wells, Huxley, Clarke, Asminov, Heinlein, Phil Dick, Will Gibson, etc., all regurgitate themes of the technocrat as the archetypal messianic savior. Filmmakers have explored these themes in films like Metropolis, Terminator, Blade Runner, the Matrix, & Ex Machina; TV series like Westworld, Black Mirror, & Person of Interest; Popular video games like Fallout, Cyberpunk 2077, Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex, & Mass Effect, etc. The Dream Factory continues engineering ideas for our imaginations. As we reach a similar cultural singularity where everyone has access to more cultural commodities, the culture continues to develop alongside the medium that disperses it to us. We have heard these dystopian nightmares as long as we’ve been alive. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, sci-fi focused on the post-human; the union of cybernetic and transhuman.
Politics and Science Fiction have had an intimate relationship at least from the time when Pres. Gerald Ford had NASA rename the first space shuttle orbiter from The Constitution to The Enterprise in response to a letter writing campaign by Star Trek fans. Pres. Reagan’s missile deterrence system called Strategic Defense Initiative was later re-dubbed the Star Wars Program. Aspects of the program reemerged under Trump’s Space Development Agency
Army Colonel Paul Linebarger, who helped organize the army’s first psy-war department. In his book Psychological Warfare (1948) wrote “Almost all the best propagandists of almost all modern powers have been, to a greater or less degree, literary personalities. The artistic and cultural aspect of writing is easily transformed for propaganda purposes.” He also wrote science-fiction under the penname Cordwainer Smith. The German’s have a word for this called Weltanschauungskrieg which translates to Worldview Warfare. Science Fiction is full of tales of techno-utopians who want to change how humans act in the world & how they see themselves. Stanford Research Institute published a document called Changing Images of Man (1974) arguing Man needs a more interconnected global prospective. It suggests using various eastern and New Age methods for societal transformation – telekinesis, biofeedback, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, hypnosis, subliminal messaging, hallucinogenic, and psychotropic drugs as potential tools – to inculcate the masses. Under “Guidelines and Strategies for Transformation” describing the signs of this emergence of this new image of man when more of humanity embraces the one-lodge, one-brotherhood of Freemasonry and The Perennial Philosophy that suggests all regions hold the same core esoteric truth.
These Hollywood blockbusters have us repeatedly choking down themes of AI turning against humanity; along with themes of war, rebellion, and betrayal. Most of the time these films show that it’s man who sowed the seeds of his own destruction; that these dystopian futures are the consequences of our actions. Most deal with AI rising though societal collapse and oppression of elite rulers. We’re sold these films are just exploring our fear of losing control over our creations, and our anxieties of technological advancement. We’ve become unconcerned if these are actually warnings – we’re more focused on the special effects and feeling titillated at an ever-increasing rate. Many are so hoodwinked they’re only oriented for the thrill.
Let’s look at the video game Metal Gear Solid – the plot had a Selection for Societal Sanity program where the AI would manipulate world events and the decisions of individuals, engineering their behavior. Fallout 2 has the AI Skynet (inspired by the film The Terminator) becoming self-aware and attempting to eradicate humanity. In the world of Cyberpunk 2077 the corporations use AI for oppression, control, and manipulation – the central narrative revolves around an artifact called The Relic, a device that allows the storing and transferring of human consciousness into new bodies. Deus Ex had the AI Daedalus that wants to control humanity and chart the course it decides will best lead humanity to the greater good. Mass Effect explored cosmic-oriented AI wiping out entire civilizations across the galaxy.
Just casually clicking through the television you’ll come across something like the Futurama episode “Law and Oracle” – Fry gets a job as a police officer at the Future Crimes Division and the algorithm prognosticates his best friend Bender will soon commit a crime and needs arrested; in the end it’s realized the Oracle lied. Or maybe that episode of Simpson’s when Lisa wakes Homer from a nightmare about Bart becoming a cyborg conquering the world. Lisa tells a screaming Homer “Dad, you’re not a robot. You’ve just had a nightmare, and you got possessed by the Devil.” Maybe you’ll land on Syfy channel’s adaptation of Clarke’s Childhood’s End where the Overlords usher mankind into extinction expect a few children they picked to raise. Maybe soon, we’ll get a sequel to the Six Million Dollar Man from the 1970’s – a series about a man who the Air Force turned into a super-soldier with bionic muscles and optic implants – called The Six Trillion Dollar Man where they hardwire AI into their brain. We’re on course to become cybernetic automatons that not even Norbret Wiener could’ve dreamed of.
“At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find it’s very existence from the arts.”
– Fydor Dostoevsky
Author Neal Stephenson — a favorite of Bill Gates and Peter Thiel — has a meteor-sized crater of cultural impact on Silicon Valley; many of these utopian tech-shamans have adopted these conceptual visions of the future. Peter Thiel made Cryptonomicon required reading, a novel focused on data privacy, cryptography and digital currency. Thiel named The Diamond Age one of his favorites. In Stephenson’s book Snow Crash (1992) he dreamed of many ideas that are now reality, wireless internet, laptops, virtual reality, avatars, digital currency, smartphones, etc. The novel also contained the term “the Metavese”– which is now the virtual reality experience many fortune 500 companies are trying to create. The Google Earth designer Avi Bar Zeev said Snow Crash served as a direct source of inspiration to create the app. Cryptonomicon has many parallels with Bitcoin and the “data haven” similarities to blockchain. Diamond Age describes a future where nanotechnology has advanced to a molecular level, delving into themes of entertainment-based augmented reality, biohacking, and personalized learning. Former Xbox executive. J Allard made the book required reading for employees. One of Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin, cited Snow Crash as a book that changed his life.
Philip K Dick, another prolific sci-fi author, also dreamed of technology that’s now reality. He wrote a novella, Minority Report (1956), about technology that could predict crimes before they were committed, what he called pre-crime – playing on what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime.”In 1964 he wrote The Penultimate Truth which foretells technology the works like ChatGPT. As the title of his novel famously asked, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Other tech he imagined is to come to fruition – a brain stimulating device capable of calibrating emotional responses to one another. He believed that sentient an AI satellite beamed much of this information directly into his head. At first, he thought it was an alien from Sirius only coming to conclusion later we’re stuck in a Black Iron Prison, a system of all-pervasive societal control. This “world as prison” Gnosticism has always had a home in science fiction.
Comic book author, Alan Moore, and self-proclaimed chaos magician & shaman. Moore believes high-art is synonymous with high-magick, and that art can manipulate consciousness. His novel V for Vendetta – had the main character vigilante hack into the government’s supercomputer, Fate, restructuring it for this revolutionary worldview. You see rubber meeting the road with the wanna-be robin hood hacking group Anonymous, who use V’s mask from that novel as their logo. This would resonate with Moore being a philosophical Anarchist. Any time there’s a riot or violent protests you’ll see some lunatic running around with that mask on. You can see the newest style of art, memes, affecting our reality. With Elon recently adopting the name Kekius Maximus promoting the Cult of Kek – ancient Egyptian god of Chaos – you have the blending of ancient mythology with internet culture that’s actively influencing politics; Trump received assistance in his election through pictures of this frog-deity circulating around the internet. Just the other day at CPAC, Elon coming on stage as the Dogefather, tells the audience “I am become Meme. There’s living the dream, and then there’s living the Meme. DOGE started as a meme! Isn’t that crazy!” We observe how modern culture continues be reshaped with the mixing of the internet with occult practices. How many of us even care of the shape of things to come?
I asked Elon’s AI Grok if he’s practicing these chaos magick techniques, it confirmed that he is, though he might not be aware of it.
“The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.”
– Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (1999)
Peter Thiel and JD Vance are students of the philosopher Rene Girard. He believed human beings are imitative at heart, that we desire because we see other people desire. Rivalries can expand until everyone is against everyone; what he calls a mimetic crisis. When the community finds itself on the brink of self-destruction it will create a scapegoat to sacrifice. He believed that this collective violence is the foundation for civilization. “The founding murder of a society is the murder of a scapegoat.” His thesis lies in the community uniting against the victim. This act of violence gives the community a cathartic release acting as a ritual purification. Restoring order, allowing for the creation of myths and ritual honoring the sacrificial victim. This ritualized approach ultimately gains institutionalized status. We create these myths because we can’t sustain the reality of sacrificing the pharmakós. It almost seems as if Thiel wants to force a transhumanist version of Christianity on us after he’s fully automated civilization to make us more comfortable uploading our brains onto the computer. Thiel talking about the relationship between Christianity and transhumanism says, “The thing that strikes me is how similar they are.”
Girard sees the Antichrist as a mimetic rival to Christ. This figure would imitate Christ’s concern for victims in a way that perverts Christianity: leading to a false variation of salvation. They would appear as its champion, not an obvious enemy. Mimicking Christ’s love for the victim but in a way that justifies violence against perceived oppression, perpetuating the cycle of scapegoating rather than ending it. The mechanisms of violence become unleashed, mimic rivalry on a global scale. He believes this isn’t against an individual but a collective moment. Girard warned that the victimization of society was a sign in this direction.
Peter Theil’s Founders Fund hosted a party for techno-uptoianists, Hereticon II: Apocalypse Ball, held on Halloween 2024. The organizers designed the event to explore “technologies and projects that possess ambitious, they will ultimately transform our world for the better – or destroy it.” The invite closed with “Maybe if you are not trying to destroy the world, you are not trying hard enough.” The rumor mill says that the party space was filled with busts of Elon’s head – his disembodied head floating just around every corner. At the party, Peter Thiel argued we are in the end times and that things like global policing are signs the Antichrist has come. He entered the stage to the song Right Time to Thiel – a parody of the James Bond film No Time To Die by Jan Böhmermann. Who knows, maybe he is the Antichrist!
Palantir’s Alex Karp’s new book says, we’re amid a new Technological Revolution. These philosopher kings have the ideology that new civilizations require a founding scapegoat – who’s going to be the sacrifice this time?
I don’t know about you, but I’m off to see if my Kroger grocery store’s facial recognition thinks I deserve any discounts. Peace!
