Thread by @doctorow

If you meet someone who claims to have created a system for controlling other peoples' minds, you know that they are:

a) Delusional;

b) A fraudster; and

c) A sociopath.

1/

This goes for Rasputin, Mesmer, and self-satisfied Big Tech boasters who claim that machine learning deprives of us our free will.

And it DEFINITELY goes for the CIA, whose MK-Ultra plot to perfect mind control was a kind of ghastly running joke.

2/

Writing in @jacobinmag, Alex de Jong offers a great potted history of MK-Ultra and its architect, the US government chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who, with "rehabilitated" Nazi and Imperial Japanese scientists, performed secret brainwashing experiments.

jacobinmag.com/2020/10/cia-br…

3/

The article is keyed to the upcoming paperback release of "Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control," @stephenkinzer's award-winning 2019 book on Gottlieb and his brainwashing experiments.

us.macmillan.com/books/97812501…

4/

The experiments were genuinely awful: from fogging the San Francisco Bay with bacterial pathogens to dosing suspected spies with stimulants and depressants to extract confessions from them, then secretly murdering them and dumping their bodies.

5/

It all kicked into high gear when Gottlieb encountered LSD, and began nonconsensually dosing Americans with huge amounts of it, starting with prisoners in an Appalachian addiction hospital, then branching out to unwitting research subjects at MIT, Stanford and Johns Hopkins.

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Then he hired sex-workers to entrap johns in NYC and SF, luring them to rooms where they were kidnapped and megadosed with acid.

All that is terrible, but what's fascinating about it from a modern perspective isn't merely their immorality, it's their scientific uselessness.

7/

These CIA experiments were undertaken in secret, and they were exploring a hypothesis: is mind-control possible? Did American POWs defect to North Korea because the Soviets had mind-control?

Over and over, the answer these experiments generated was a resounding NO.

8/

Everything they tried to do failed, repeatedly, dismally, and with terrible human costs. And yet, at every turn, the scientists involved - eminent scientists who'd done productive work in the nonsecret world of peer review - kept telling themselves they were succeeding.

9/

And so did their paymasters! The entire operation is an incredible example of how the scientific method - and its transparency and adversarial peer review - are what prevents scientists and funders from falling prey to motivated reasoning.

10/

Everything MK-Ultra did was a radioactively obvious failure, but all these super-smart, powerful people repeatedly talked themselves into viewing their experiments as success.

11/

Their hypothesis ("Is mind control a thing?") was actually a conclusion ("Mind control is definitely a thing, and we have to figure it out"). But as we say in the crypto wars, wanting something badly is not enough.

12/

All of this reminds me so much of Big Data and Big Tech, behavioral ads and behavioral modification. Back when hard drives got cheap and the web got wired for surveillance, the industry concluded, a priori, that with enough data, intentions could be divined... and shaped.

13/

We were presented with this in IPO documents and conference presentations as a fait accompli, rather than as a hypothesis. The companies attracted vast amounts of capital and built vast surveillance and analysis systems.

14/

For many of us, the existence of these systems was proof that they were onto something: "No one would fund this if it wasn't producing." Advertisers flocked to behavioral ads because they were convinced on this basis that they must work.

15/

The ad industry's most successful product, of course, is itself: its ability to convince advertisers that it will spend its money wisely and multiply it through scientifically proven marketing techniques.

16/

Just as the CIA's most successful product wasn't mind-control, it was the IDEA of mind-control, which excited the congressjerks who held their purse-strings.

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And, like Gottlieb, the ad-tech industry performed nonconsensual human experiments. Remember back in 2012, when Facebook dosed 61,000,000 unsuspecting users with messages that were supposed to get them to vote?

nature.com/news/facebook-…

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And, like Gottlieb, they trumpeted this as a success! Those 61,000,000 interventions yielded an additional 60,000 votes - that is, a little less than A TENTH OF A PERCENT of people who received the dose changed their behavior in a tiny way. SUCCESS!

19/

Some people look at this experiment and recoil in horror at the thought that Facebook has perfected a mind-control ray. I look at it and think, well, the first time you exposed 61m people to a tactic, 0.1% of them responded.

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Many of those people will become inured with repeat exposure, so mostly what this shows is that FB is really bad at doing what they charge people money for: influencing its users' behavior.

But it also shows something else: that FB are monsters.

21/

Because anyone who TRIES to build a mind-control ray is a sociopath. Anyone who funds a mind-control ray is a sociopath. Anyone who invests in a mind-control ray is a sociopath. Trying to make mind-control a thing disqualifies you from participating in decent society.

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But working in secret to do impossible, wicked things doesn't mean you'll succeed. It means you'll probably end up kidding yourself, even as you fail and fail and fail.

That doesn't make you harmless. Gottlieb and FB both destroyed the lives they touched.

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But it means we should address you as a sociopathic fraudster who got high on your own supply - not as a supergenius whose secret invention puts the future of human free will at risk.

24/

The only people these evil clowns really manage to brainwash is themselves and the people who pay their bills. Everyone else, they merely torture.

eof/