Omega Point 

The coining of the term transhumanism is erroneously attributed to Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley (1887-1975), in a 1957 article. However, as pointed out by Olivier Dard and Alexandre Moatti, the first to use the term was Jean Coutrot—head of the Synarchic Empire Movement (MSE) and founder of the CHSP—based on his promotion of the fascist doctrine of the “New Man.”[1] In 1935, Contort published De quo vivre, which outlined his vision for a new order based on what he called “new humanism.” According to Jackie Clarke, “In its various forms, this vision of a new humanism emphasized the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the need to take account of the spiritual or non rational dimensions of human personality.”[2] According to Controt, the engineer would play a central role in establishing this new order, serving as what he called “engineer in human sciences.”[3]

Coutrot’s central concern was that human sciences had not kept pace with that of the material sciences. In his 1936 book, L’Humanise économique, he argued for the reorganization of the economy by experts, in the interests of human need. At the heart of this activity was the promise of the advent of a “mystic of the future” to regenerate the human species, “transhumanism,” the central objective of the Center for the Study of Human Problems (CSHP), which he founded with Aldous Huxley with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.[4] The word “transhumanism” was first mentioned at a conference hosted by Coutrot in 1939 in Pontigny Abbey, founded in 1114 by Hugh of Mâcon, who later joined his friend St. Bernard de Clairvaux at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to officially approve and endorse the Templars on behalf of the Church.

According to Coutrot, transhumanism would be a “gathering around the Truth” of the various human types: sensory, conformist, intuitive and rationalist. As man has evolved, so will he continue to transform himself. The future “sciences of man” that Coutrot calls for would make it possible to better understand this humanism in evolution towards a transhumanism. Empirical science will serve to explain human behavior, and therefore lead the foundation of a rational organization of humanity. Thus, Coutrot’s conference concluded: “All these aspects of various humanisms constitute what we can call transhumanism.”[5] Coutrot wrote in a letter to Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) in 1939: “Please accept, my dear Doctor, the expression of our most sympathetic and ‘transhumanist’ feelings.”[6]

The combined influences on the concept of transhumanism, explain Dard and Moatti, derive from the idea of a man transcending his human condition, towards union with God. According to the two authors, that idea derives from Coutrot and Julian Huxley’s close friend and member of the CSHP, the French palaeontologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). De Chardin wrote in his 1949 book The Future of Mankind: “Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of ‘trans-humanizing’ himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent.”[7] The second influence is from a secular and scientific inspiration, that of man surpassing the human condition thanks to science and technology. That is, Julian Huxley’s “Religion without Revelation,” a religion of Man. Julian was first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association.

Teilhard de Chardin was also the primary inspiration behind both the New Age movement and the creation of the Internet, a project associated with cybernetics and MK-Ultra. Considered the “Catholic Darwin,” Teilhard is known for his attempt at synthesizing Christianity and the theory of evolution. Teilhard, who was trained as paleontologist and geologist, took part in the infamous Peking Man and Piltdown Man, the largest academic scandal in history, that attempted to substantiate the truth of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis. Teilhard was closely associated with Aldous’s brother Julian, who wrote the introduction to Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man (1955). According to Julian Huxley, revealing his Kabbalistic outlook, wrote: “evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”[8]

Teilhard’s reading of Henri Bergon’s The Creative Evolution was, he said, the “catalyst of a fire which devoured already its heart and its spirit.” The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a “vital impetus” that can also be understood as humanity’s natural creative impulse. James intended to write the introduction to the English translation of the book, but died in 1910 prior to its completion. In spite of being critical of him, de Chardin regarded James’ position as somewhat akin to his own.[9]

Teilhard de Chardin laid the ground for aspirations of creating artificial intelligence by arguing that as mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the “Noosphere” will grow in awareness.[10] This process culminates in the goal of history, which he referred to as the “Omega Point,” which posits that all the organisms on Earth will reach a higher evolutionary point by merging into one “planetized spirit,” when humans would merge their collective intelligence into one super-mind through computer technology, as a necessary first step in the collective evolution of the universe.

For the movie The Exorcist, the interior of the room at Georgetown of Damien Karras, the young priest and psychiatrist who assists Father Merrin, was a meticulous reconstruction of King’s “corridor Jesuit” room in New North Hall at the university. Every element of King’s room, including posters and books, was recreated for the set, including a poster of Teilhard de Chardin. The character of Father Lankester Merrin was also based on Teilhard. Parts of the plot were themed on Teilhard’s theory of evil (or the existence of Satan) in the world possibly being Lucifer (or matter-energy spirit) working out its salvation through the process of physical evolution ending in Teilhard’s Omega Point.[11]

Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan, who was also influenced by the ideas of de Chardin, is known for coining the expressions “the medium is the message” and the “global village,” and for predicting the Internet as an “extension of consciousness.” McLuhan tutored and befriended Jesuit priest Walter J. Ong, a friend of de Chardin, who would go on to write his PhD dissertation on a topic McLuhan had called to his attention. Ong would also later become a well-known authority on communication and technology.

Teilhard de Chardin also influenced Arthur C. Clarke who explored transhumanist ideas in his 1968 novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time.[12] In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, Clarke predicted that the construction of what H.G. Wells called the World Brain would take place in two stages. Clarke identified the first of these as the construction of the World Library, or Wells’ universal encyclopedia, accessible to everyone from their home on computer terminals by the year 2000. In the second stage, the World Library would be incorporated into the World Brain, a superintelligent artificially intelligent supercomputer that humans would be able to interact with to solve various world problems. He suggested that this supercomputer should be installed in the former war rooms of the US and the Soviet Union, once the superpowers had matured enough to agree to co-operate rather than war with each other. Clarke predicted the construction of the “World Brain” would be completed by the year 2100.[13]

Arthur C. Clarke, along with OTO member Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, is considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction.[14] In the seminal short story by Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question” (in the book Robot Dreams), humanity merges its collective consciousness with its own creation: an all-powerful cosmic computer. The resulting intelligence spends eternity working out whether “The Last Question” can be answered, namely, “Can entropy ever be reversed.” When the intelligence discovers that entropy can be reversed, it does so with the command: “LET THERE BE LIGHT.”

Cybernetics

Teilhard writes briefly but positively about computers and the “young science of cybernetics.”[15] Between 1930 and 1933, fellow CSHP member Sergei Chakhotin held a three-year research scholarship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, where he worked on a project called M.T. (Mass-Time), a manual computer, which therefore places it as one of the forerunners in the field.[16] In 1944, with Dr. Morris B. Sanders, Chakhotin would co-found the Science Action Liberation (SAL) to fulfill the “Plan” which coincided exactly with the ideas of Wells’ Open Conspiracy.[17] Sanders had been involved in the OSS, was also a board member of the Carnegie Endowment.[18] Sanders pitched Chakhotin’s M-T computer to various influential people.

Sanders also met Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974), one of the pioneers in the development of the computer, particularly known for his engineering work on analog computers. During World War II, Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments of the Manhattan Project. His office was considered one of the key factors in winning the war. He is known in engineering for his work on analog computers and for founding Raytheon. Bush became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938.

Bush was so impressed by the similarity of their respective ideas, that he immediately proposed an article for the magazine The Scientist Looks at Tomorrow, in which he would focus on the extraordinary possibilities that would open up by mechanizing Chakhotin’s M-T machine.[19] Bush is also known for the invention of the Memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web. In 1945, Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic Monthly in which he predicted:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “Memex” will do. A Memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.[20]

In 1940, cybernetics pioneer and Macy Conference participant Norbert Wiener offered his services to Bush, and referred to Bush’s work in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.[21] From 1952, Warren McCulloch, who was then working with Andrija Puharich’s Round Table Foundation in the investigation of psychic phenomena on behalf of the CIA, also worked at the MIT with Wiener, where together with Walter Pitts they made pioneering contributions to the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. McCulloch, who served as chairman of the Cybernetics Group conferences, was “the guiding spirit of cybernetics in the United States.”[22] McCulloch was a founding member of the American Society for Cybernetics and its second president during 1967–1968. The inaugural dinner chairman was Frank Fremont-Smith, the medical director of the CIA front, the Josiah Macy Foundation.

John von Neumann was one the few scientists with full knowledge of the Manhattan Project’s true purpose, and helped to select the target sites for the atomic bomb-drop in Japan. He also served as consultant to Standard Oil, IBM, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Air Force, Los Alamos Labs, RAND and the CIA, among others. He is credited with the equilibrium strategy of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. He helped to develop Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the first electronic general-purpose computer, which was used to do computations for the Hydrogen Bomb. He was also central to the development of the idea of neural nets, the conceptual forerunner of the Internet.[23] During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as “violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm.” He was quoted in 1950 remarking, “If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”[24]

Wiener referred to cybernetics as, “the study of control and communication in machines and living beings.”[25] Arturo Rosenblueth, an influential member of the core group at the Macy Conferences, speaking on behalf of John von Neumann and his mentor Norbert Wiener, had proposed to gather together a group of scientists to devise experiments in social control, based on the assumption that the human brain was merely a complex input/output machine, and that human behavior could, in effect, be programmed, on both on an individual and societal level.

Wiener wrote two books which would define cybernetics as a scientific field of interdisciplinary study. His first book, published in 1948, was Cybernetics, or Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine. The book discusses the relationship between man and machine as developing symbiotically through what Wiener called “feedback loops,” where each relayed information back to the other to adjust their performance. It was therefore also concerned with the possibility of machines “augmenting” humans. Thus, Weiner’s book is believed to have laid the theoretical foundation for robotics, computer artificial intelligence and the Internet.[26]

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the possibility of self-replicating machines. The theological implications of this idea were further explored in God and Golem, Inc. (1964), where Wiener compares the creative power of God with that of man creating machines, and machines ultimately reproducing themselves. Among the symbols featured on the front cover is a Masonic all-seeing eye. Wiener suggests that resistance to these ideas is rooted in the same prejudices that once stigmatized magic, and draws parallels to the practices of the Black Mass, as well as the Golem of Kabbalistic legend and Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. According to Wiener, “If we adhere to all these taboos, we may acquire a great reputation as conservative and sound thinkers, but we shall contribute very little to the further advance of knowledge. It is the part of the scientist—of the intelligent man of letters and of the honest clergyman as well—to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.”[27]

However, Wiener also sounded the warning about the potential threat of thinking machines overtaking humans. Wiener proclaimed the advent of a “second industrial revolution,” which would bring about fully automated factories running without human assistance, and which he believed carried “great possibilities for good and for evil.”[28] Cybernetic techniques and technologies, he argued, “open to us vistas of a period of greater plenty than the human race has ever known, although they create at the same time the possibility of a more devastating level of social ruin and perversion than any we have yet known.”[29] However, Wiener warned, “The skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive,” but “the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.”[30]

Similarly, John von Neumann developed the universal constructor, a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann’s book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966. Von Neumann’s goal was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself.

Psychotronics

Esalen founder Michael Murphy had made a total of four trips to the Soviet Union, in 1971, 1972, 1979, and 1980. The first two visits were privately organized, while on the last trip he came by invitation, indirectly, of the KGB, officially hosted by the faculty of American Studies at Moscow University. [31] Through the Esalen Institute, the CIA encouraged the exploration of parapsychology and psychotronics, which are linked to cybernetics through its study of the human mind in relation to psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence and purported psychic abilities.

The term psychotronics was introduced in 1967 by Zdenek Rejdak to avoid the negative connotations of “parapsychology.” Rejdak was a Czech scientist, member of the Knights of Malta and president of the International Association for Research Psychotronic (IAPR), which was founded at the first International Congress of psychics in Prague in 1973.[32] At the Prague conference, Rejdak revealed the following about the relationship between computers and artificial telepathy, from his paper titled “Psychotronics Reveals New Possibilities for Cybernetics”:

Theoretical cyberneticians are proposing at present the construction of computers that would “create” and would possess at least a degree of intuition… Psychotronics has a great opportunity to provide much essential knowledge about these processes, and thereby to help cybernetics in solving one of the most complicated tasks, that of teaching computers to create… The point is not merely to build more perfect computers, but primarily computers with qualitatively new functions. Work is now underway on a fourth generation of computers, and a fifth generation is being planned. Therefore, it is very timely for cybernetics to include in its studies also the results of work and research in psychotronics.[33]

Accompanying the Soviets’ research into psychotronics was their interest in cybernetics. Beginning in the 1950s, there was an explosion of interest in cybernetics inside the Soviet Union. Cybernetics was initially outlawed in the Soviet Union as bourgeois pseudoscience, and Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics was condemned as contrary to “dialectic materialism.”[34] However, the military in particular recognized the value of the emerging computer technology, and the risks of being left behind. Party leaders were soon convinced, and the Communist Party Program singled out cybernetics as crucial to the construction of communism, setting the stage for Wiener’s triumphal visit to Moscow in 1960 to attend a mathematics conference. In October 1961, just in time for the opening of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party, the Cybernetics Council of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a volume appropriately entitled Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. The new Program vigorously asserted that cybernetics, electronic computers, and control systems “will be widely applied in production processes in industry, building, and transport, in scientific research, planning, designing, accounting, statistics, and management.” [35]

Soviet psychotronics attracted the attention of the Americans, and was investigated by Michael Murphy of the CIA-connected Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. In the 1960s, Murphy had begun writing to civilians in the Soviet Union, who were doing research, independently of the state, into psychic abilities. Esalen had been aware of the Soviet interest in such things from the travels of Fritz Perls and Stanislav Grof. After Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, authors of Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, attended the first annual International Parapsychology Conference in Moscow in 1968 on parapsychology and ESP and reported of a “race for inner space,” in which Soviet scientists were exploring the paranormal with the hope gaining an advantage over the US, Murphy and two of his friends travelled to Russia in 1971. Murphy and Karl Nikolaiev, a well-known telepath living in Russia, experimented with another form of transcontinental information exchange.

Nikolaev, who taught himself Yoga through books and allegedly received telepathic transmissions in Leningrad from a controlled sender in Moscow. Murphy also with Dzuna Davitashvili, the personal faith healer of Leonid Brezhnev, and Wolf Messing, a Polish Jewish immigrant who fled Poland ager Hitler put a price on his head for prophesying the demise of the Fuhrer.[36] Messing had met both Einstein and Freud in Einstein’s apartment and participated in a psychic experiment they requested. In his 1982 book, An End to Ordinary History, a small group of researchers pursue psychic possibilities to the Soviet Union, while being closely watched by the CIA and KGB. When asked how much of the book was based in reality, Murphy says, “All of it!”[37] “To use a metaphor from Star Wars, that was the Dark Side of the force,” explained Murphy. “They were trying to develop this technology of the paranormal, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Nobody knows the exact figures, but certainly America put $100 million into this. And we knew all the central players.”[38]

Stanford Research Institute 

A year before the 1973 parapsychology conference in Prague, Time magazine wrote about the “Mind-Reading Computer” being developed at the CIA-connected Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by interpreting EEG patterns. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, SRI is one of the world’s largest scientific research organizations, funded directly by US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA’s Office of Technical Services and Office Research. Originally founded as a means of attracting commercial business research at Stanford University in California, in the 1970s SRI began taking on military and intelligence contracts, many of them classified. According to John Coleman, SRI “can be described as one of the ‘jewels’ in Tavistock’s crown in its rule over the United States.”[39] SRI’s network, Coleman claims, now extends from the University of Sussex to the US through the Esalen Institute, MIT, Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, Aspen Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, US Air Force Intelligence, and the RAND Corporation.

The director of the Educational Policy Research Center at SRI was Willis Harman, the personality who tied the connection between MK-Ultra, psychotronics and the development of the personal computer. Beginning as a professor of electrical engineering and system analysis, Harman went on to become a senior social scientist with SRI, describing his contribution as, “helping clients in government and business do strategic planning over a very wide range of practical policy issues. My particular task was to help them think about the issues in the context of the future environment in which the consequences of their decisions would manifest.”[40]

While at SRI, Harman hired Captain Al Hubbard as a “special investigative agent.”[41] It was Hubbard who had first introduced Aldous Huxley to LSD. Over the years, Hubbard, who had worked for the OSS during the war as a “Special Investigative Agent,” also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice Department and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. In 1955, Hubbard, known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” introduced both Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley to LSD, considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. Hubbard was also in contact with LSD evangelist Timothy Leary who began privately purchasing large quantities of LSD as well.[42] Through his extensive connections, which included the Pope, as he once boasted, he has been credited with “turning on” as many as 6,000 people to LSD.[43]

ARPANET 

As is often the case, the United States’ development of computers and artificial intelligence was justified through a purported threat posed by similar advancements in the Soviet Union. A team of CIA intelligence analysts, led by John J. Ford, a Soviet expert working in the Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, who began studying the explosion of interest in cybernetics among the Soviets. Russian proponents of cybernetics proposed optimizing the functioning of the Soviet system by creating a large number of regional computer centers to collect, process, and redistribute economic data for efficient planning and management. According to Engineer Admiral Aksel Berg, Chairman of the Academy Council on Cybernetics in 1962, “These machines, aptly called ‘cybernetic machines’, will solve the problem of continuous optimal planning and control.”[44] The popular press began to call computers “machines of communism.” [45]

On October 17, 1962, Ford submitted a summary of his findings to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President Kennedy’s Special Assistant, who warned that “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.” If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, “we are finished.”[46] President Kennedy then asked his Science Advisor Dr. Jerome Wiesner, who had participated in several of the cybernetics conferences of the Macy Foundation, to set up a cybernetics panel to “take a look at what we’re doing compared to what they’re doing, and what this means for the future.”[47] Wiesner had headed the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and regarded Norbert Wiener as his mentor. In 1952, Wiesner took over the directorship of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT, where leading members of the Cybernetics Group had all taken up residence.

Claims about the Soviet computer networks were completely unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, US research in artificial intelligence received a very significant financial boost.[48] Much of the work at the Artificial Intelligence labs at Stanford University and at MIT was funded through the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA began as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for the purpose of forming and executing research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science able to reach far beyond immediate military requirements.

Starting in 1963, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) heavily funded Project MAC at MIT and other artificial intelligence initiatives. ARPA funded the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the progenitor of what was to become the Internet. The ARPANET developed when, in the late 1960s, Robert Taylor, a rocket specialist from NASA and enthusiast of Wiener’s cybernetics and the first computers, transferred to the Pentagon. In late 1962, Taylor met J.C.R. Licklider, the IPTO’s first directory. A former participant in the Macy Conferences of the Cybernetics Group, Licklider has been called “computing’s Johnny Appleseed” and been credited as an early pioneer of cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI). While at MIT, Licklider was also very close to Jerome Wiesner, and when the latter became President Kennedy’s Science Advisor, Licklider was appointed the head of a panel on scientific and technical communications. Thus, in addition to his work at the Pentagon, Licklider divided his time between ARPA and Wiesner’s Office of Science and Technology.

Licklider is also remembered as an Internet pioneer, with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. In his 1960 article, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider outlined his vision of a network of “thinking centers,” multi-user computer timesharing systems, which would “incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and symbiotic functions.”[49] Licklider co-authored “The Computer as a Communication Device” with Robert Taylor who directed the IPTO from 1966 to 1969. Under Taylor, the IPTO worked to unite “digitally isolated” research groups into a “supercommunity” by developing the ARPANET.

Project MAC (Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was launched in 1963 with a grant from the DARPA. The project was interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which was viewed as the keys to more intelligent machines. It enlisted an “AI Group” that included Marvin Minsky as director, and John McCarthy who invented Lisp. Computer scientist Marvin Minsky was co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, and wrote on relationships between human and artificial intelligence beginning in the 1960s.

International Foundation for Advanced Study

At Robert Taylor’s urging, a complete computer hardware-software system called the oN-Line System, or more commonly NLS, was first demonstrated by computer visionary Douglas Engelbart in San Francisco in 1968. In the early 1960s, Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers, as well as Fadiman, at his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located at SRI. His idea was to free computing from merely being about number crunching to becoming a tool for communications and information-retrieval. He wanted to turn Vannevar Bush’s idea for a Memex machine into reality, where a machine used interactively by one person could “Augment” their intelligence. Over the course of six years, with the funding both NASA and ARPA, Engelbart’s team went about putting together all the elements that would make such a computer system a reality.

Engelbart was one of first LSD subjects of Clifton Fadiman at International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) in Menlo Park. The vice president of IFAS, which was Captain Al Hubbard’s brainchild, was Willis Harman of SRI. IFAS conducted clinical studies that attempted to measure the effects of LSD, mescaline, and other drugs on creativity. The founder and president of IFAS was Myron J. Stolaroff. Born in Roswell, New Mexico, Stolaroff received a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and from 1946 to 1960 he worked at Ampex, one of the first of the high-technology companies to emerge in the valleys south of San Francisco. Stolaroff was in contact with Gordon Wasson, and was introduced to psychedelics by Gerald Heard and travelled to Vancouver to partake of Al Hubbard’s LSD sessions.[50] Hubbard became a member of IFAS’s board, along with Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer.[51]

Also involved at IFAS was James Fadiman, a former student of Timothy Leary’s colleague at Harvard, Dr. Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Ram Dass), who introduced him to psilocybin, the active agent in magic mushrooms. Fadiman later became Harman’s teaching assistant. Fadiman eventually taught at San Francisco State, finished his PhD in psychology at Stanford. His research at the foundation focused on the changes in beliefs, attitude, and behavior that resulted from taking LSD.

The real purpose of IFAS, explains John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, was to make LSD credible to the medical establishment. While Stolaroff was president, IFAS conducted clinical studies that attempted to measure the effects of LSD, mescaline, and other drugs on creativity. Stolaroff was convinced that, if used as part of the Ampex product-design process, LSD could be used as a tool for improving a company’s business by inspiring creativity in both engineers and artists. IFAS ultimately led more than 350 people, including some of the best engineers in the region, through their first psychedelic experiences.

USCO

Among Fadiman’s LSD test subjects at IFAS was Stewart Brand, who spearheaded the movement that drew on the 1960s counterculture to present the “personal computer,” a term he coined, as a tool of personal empowerment. Another graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Brand was deeply influenced by Marshall McLuhan, as well as cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, known for his designs of biospheres.

First serving as a soldier in the US Army, Brand worked at the Pentagon as a photographer, and in 1961 he served in Vietnam. He studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College in 1962. In 1963, based on their mutual interest, Brand contacted Kesey who invited him to join the Merry Pranksters, and is described in the beginning of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the course of his research, Brand lived with two different Indian tribes, the Oregon Silcots and the Navajos of the southwestern desert. Of the latter he has said, “Anything I know about organization, I learned at a Navajo peyote meeting one night.”[52] Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, featured a schizophrenic Indian chief Bromden who was from the same reservation where Brand had done some work, supposedly as a photo-journalist. Brand was inspired by Kesey’s book, where he thought the struggle between Bromden and the mental hospital was reflective of the one between the government and the Indian reservations.[53]

During his time with them, Brand produced the Trips Festival, involving rock music and light shows, which was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. According to Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven, Kesey and the Acid Tests, particularly the Trips Festival, were the catalyst of the cultural explosion at Haight-Ashbury, “which had been like throwing a switch that sent a surge of energy through the isolated pockets of hipness surrounding the Bay Area.”[54]

When Brand moved to New York, he hung out with members of the Beat scene, like Gerd Stern, who is considered a pioneer in the genre of multimedia art. Stern had known Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon, since the three of them had met when they were patients of the New York Psychiatric Institute in 1949, which was headed by Dr. Nolan D. C. Lewis, the Scottish Rite’s Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox.[55] Stern also collaborated with Marshall McLuhan, taught communications and media at Harvard University’s School of Education, and served as consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation arts program.[56]

Stern’s background in the Bay Area Beat community grew out of his involvement with Pacifica radio station, where he met Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts. Stern, Brand and other artists and engineers formed what was known as USCO, for “The Company of Us,” a media art collective which produced multimedia art internationally, which was most active in Woodstock, New York during the years 1964–66. Living not too far from the Millbrook Estate, they became involved with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner.[57] In 1965 USCO collaborated with Leary and Alpert’s Castalia Foundation, a precursor to the League for Spiritual Discovery, to reproduce the LSD experience in an “audio-olfactory-visual alteration of consciousness” psychedelic art event in New York City.[58]

USCO exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is considered a key link in the development of expanded cinema, visual music, installation art, and the Internet.[59] USCO were influenced by McLuhan, and used stroboscopes, projectors and audiotapes in their performances. Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian American filmmaker, poet, and artist tied to the Fluxus movement. Mekas, who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” presented a series of multimedia productions, under the title New Cinema Festival 1 (later referred to as the Expanded Film Festival), at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City. Mekas, was a close friend of Kenneth Anger, and a close collaborator with artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas. Other participants in the series included well-known and emerging figures such as Angus Maclise (with members of the Velvet Underground), Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol.

The Program Manager was John Brockman, a young producer associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, who could later become a famous literary agent as head of Brockman Inc., which represented science and technology writers. Brockman designed the promotional poster promoted the 1968 psychedelic comedy film about the Monkees, Head, written by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson and directed by Rafelson. The Monkees, the “prefab four,” who were created for a mid-1960s American television series, approached the project as a chance to disassociate themselves from the image that had created them.[60] In their well-known themesong they sing, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies.” Brockman would later achieve some infamy for his association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Stern and Michael Callahan co-founded Intermedia Systems Corporation in 1969, the year the company handled some management and administrative details for the Woodstock festival. Intermedia was a term used in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various inter-disciplinary art activities that occurred between genres in the 1960s. Gerd’s solo work and collaborative multi-media projects with USCO have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Museum, Vienna’s Kunsthalle, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Other career highlights included manager for Maya Angelou, writer for Playboy and producer of the Timothy Leary Psychedelic Theater.

Mother of All Demos

As explained in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, the personal computer was in large part a product of the “computer liberation” movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s. Brand was a follower of Gregory Bateson and passionate about cybernetics, and spearheaded the movement that drew on the 1960s counterculture to present the “personal computer.” Most his generation, Brand recalled, rejected computers as tools of centralized control by a militarized superpower. It was through Brand’s efforts that the counterculture adopted the computer instead as a tool for personal liberation. The change of outlook was celebrated in an ode to cybernetics, titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” written by Richard Brautigan in 1967.

Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, published between 1968 and 1971, which identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.” Its first issue was devoted to cybernetics, starting with a review of Norbert Wiener’s 1948 inaugural book on the subject. According to John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, “The catalog ultimately helped shape the view of an entire generation, which came to believe that computing technologies could be used in the service of such goals as political revolution and safeguarding the environment.”[61]

As explained by Erik Davis in TechGnosis, “Bateson later bloomed into the quintessential California philosopher, a resident of Esalen and patron saint of the Whole Earth Catalog.” Brand explained, “What I found missing was any clear conceptual bonding of cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking,” and, “In the summer of ‘72, a book began to fill it in for me: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson.” [62] Steps, which was Bateson’s most influential book, was finished when he was at the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii in 1971, working with dolphins. Throughout his life, Bateson attributed great importance to his participation in the Macy conferences. “My debt,” he mentioned in the early seventies, “is evident in everything that I have written since World War II.”[63] Man and computer, according to Bateson, were part of a feedback loop, such that they were joined together in a single mental activity. This provided Bateson the opportunity to suggest that computers or machines were alive in the sense that they participated with humans in a pantheistic ecology, where the entire universe was divine, a perception of reality which was typically associated with LSD. As Bateson explained in Steps:

The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.[64]

In the 1972 when Brand was commissioned to write an article for Rolling Stone, he visited in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The resulting article, titled “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” provided a seminal influence, announcing, “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.” Brand added, “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” Brand has been credited with creating the computer hacker subculture as the direct result of the article.[65]

Brand filmed Engelbart’s demonstration of a mouse-based user interface was later dubbed “the Mother of All Demos.” The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, all tools that Engelbart believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals: multiple windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work).

Apple

The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. Taylor was founder and later manager of Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center until 1996. PARC is a research and development company based in Palo Alto, with a distinguished reputation for its significant contributions to the modern personal computer, including graphical user interface (GUI), featuring windows and icons and operated with a mouse. According to Taylor, referring to the influence of J.C.R. Licklider:

…most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick’s vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all.[66]

PARC hired many employees of the nearby Augmentation Research Center of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as that facility’s funding from DARPA, NASA, and the US Air Force began to diminish. In 1979, a young Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was allowed into PARC’s inner sanctum to peer at its secrets. Jobs hired a number of engineers from PARC and the end-result was the Macintosh, and its graphical user interface. However, the idea, in turn, was “stolen” by Bill Gates, to create Windows for Microsoft, though both revolutionized the personal computer. According to Steve Jobs, Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was “one the bibles of my generation.”[67]

According to Erik Davis in TechGnosis, “With a name that hearkened back to Eden’s fruit of knowledge (and an initial selling price of $666), the Apple proffered the Promethean dream of putting godly power in your hands.”[68] Timothy Leary mentioned that it is no accident that “the term ‘LSD’ was used twice in Time magazine’s cover story about Steve Jobs.”[69] Leary confessed that initially, he was very much against computers. To Leary, IBM was “Big Brother.” This was the same allegory Apple used in their iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad, directed by Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner. “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the commercial concluded, “and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.”

[1] Olivier Dard & Alexandre Moatti. “Aux origines du mot ’transhumanisme.” Futuribles, Association Futuribles, 2016.

[2] Jackie Clarke. “Engineering a New Order in the 1930s: The Case of Jean Coutrot.” French Historical Studies v24 n1 (2001), p. 72.

[3] Judith A. Merkle. Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley, Calif., 1980), 136-7; cited Clarke. “Engineering a New Order in the 1930s,” p. 72.

[4] Olivier Dard. Jean Coutrot: de l'ingénieur au prophète (Presses Univ. Franche-Comté, 1999), p. 223, 379-381.

[5] Olivier Dard & Alexandre Moatti. “Aux origines du mot ’transhumanisme.” Futuribles, Association Futuribles, 2016.

[6] Cited in Alain Drouard, « La Fondation pour l'étude des problèmes humains et l'organisation de la recherche en sciences sociales en France », Cahiers pour l'histoire du CNRS, 9, 1990.

[7] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Future of Mankind (1949).

[8] Pierre Teilard de Chardin. The Human Phenomenon, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press), p. 114.

[9] Ursula King & Joseph Needham. Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions: Spirituality and Mysticism in an Evolutionary World (New York: Paulist Press, 2011), p. 46.

[10] Mortier, J. & Auboux, M.-L., The Teilhard de Chardin Album (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) p. 110).

[11] “Bill Blatty on ‘The Exorcist’”. www.geocities.com, retrieved from the Wayback machine. Archived from the original on 2002-01-23.

[12] Ranked #15 by the American Film Institute. “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies – 10th Anniversary Edition.” (Retrieved 28 February 2014).

[13] Arthur C. Clarke. Profiles of the Future; an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

[14] “The Big Three and the Clarke–Asimov Treaty”. wireclub.com

[15] Mortier, J. and Auboux, M.-L., The Teilhard de Chardin Album. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) p. 110).

[16] Serge Chakhotin. The Rape of the Masses (1939)

[17] Ibid., p. 29.

[18] Ibid., p. 27-28.

[19] Moncomble. Du viol des foules à la synarchie, ou le complot permanent, p. 28.

[20] Vannevar Bush (July 1945). “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly. (April 2012).

[21] Peter Galison. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), p. 228.

[22] Andrew Pickering. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (The University of Chicago Press, 2011) p. 4.

[23] John M.Unsworth. “LSD, Mind Control, and the Internet: A Chronology,” handout with “Information Theory, Postmodernism, and Mind Control (or, What LSD, Mass Media, and the Internet Have in Common),” presented at the 1994 Conference of the Society for Literature and Science, New Orleans, LA, November, 1994.

[24] Jr. Blair Clay. “Passing of a Great Mind.” Life (February 25, 1957), p. 96.

[25] Norbert Wiener. God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (The MIT Press, 1964) p. vii.

[26] Thomas Rid. The Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).

[27] Wiener. God & Golem Inc, p. 5.

[28] Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass. 1948). p. 28.

[29] Norbert Wiener, “The Machine as Threat and Promise,” Wiener, Collected Works, volume IV (1953), p. 677.

[30] Wiener. Cybernetics, p. 28.

[31] Birgit Menzel. “Occult and Esoteric Movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s” Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed. The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, Volume 17) p. 180.

[32] Petr Kalač. “A Brief History of Czech esoteric scene from the late 19th century until 1989.” Documentation Centre of the Czech Hermetic (2004).

[33] Joan D’Arc. Phenomenal World: Remote Viewing, Astral Travel, Apparitions, Extraterrestrials, Lucid Dreams and Other Forms of Intelligent Contact in the Magical Kingdom of Mind-at-Large (Escondido: The Book Tree, 2000) p. 164.

[34] «Кибернетика», Краткий философский словарь под редакцией М. Розенталя и П. Юдина (издание 4, дополненное и исправленное, Государственное издательство политической литературы, 1954.

[35] Slava Gerovitch. “How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union.” Nautilus (April 9, 2015).

[36] Kripal. Esalen, p. 318.

[37] Sarah Laskow, “How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War” Atlas Obsura (December 8, 2015).

[38] Ibid.

[39] Coleman. The Committee of 300.

[40] “Global Mind Change.” The Scythe Connection. Retrieved from http://www.scytheconnection.com/adp/docs/globalMind.html

[41] Lee & Shlain. Acid Dreams, p. 156.

[42] Ralph Metzner. The Ecstatic Adventure (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

[43] Todd Brendan Fahey. “The Original Captain Trips.” High Times, (November 1991).

[44] Aksel’ Berg. “Kibernetika i nauchno-tekhnicheskii progress.” cited in Aleksandr Kuzin, ed., Biologicheskie aspekty kibernetiki, (Moscow, 1962), p. 14.

[45] Slava Gerovitch. “How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union.” Nautilus (April 9, 2015).

[46] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Robert F. Kennedy, (October 20, 1962); Schlesinger Personal Papers, box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.

[47] John F. Kennedy, Dictating Memorandum, 28 November 1962; Presidential Recordings, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., cassette J, dictabelt XXX.A.

[48] Slava Gerovitch. “How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union.” Nautilus (April 9, 2015).

[49] J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1 (March 1960), p. 7.

[50] Stevens. Storming Heaven.

[51] Accoding to Myron Stolaroff, in “Hofmann’s Potion.” Documentary by Connie Littlefield, NFB.

[52] Rolling Stone, (December 13, 1969).

[53] Lutz Dammbecks. The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003 documentary)

[54] Jay Stevens. Storming Heaven, p. 237.

[55] “Interview with Beat Poet and Multi-media Artist Gerd Stern” The Allen Ginsberg Project: Gerd Stern - 1 [http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.ca/2014/10/gerd-stern-1.html]

[56] Gerd Stern. “The IMC Lab Gallery” [http://www.theimclab.com/artists/GerdStern#.VXhLUuegL-t]

[57] Gerd Stern. “Oral History: From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978.” The Bancroft Library, 2001. p. 83.

[58] Jennifer Ulrich. “Transmissions from The Timothy Leary Papers: Evolution of the ‘Psychedelic" Show’” New York Public Library (June 4, 2012).

[59] Michel Oren. “USCO: Getting Out of Your Head to Use Your Head.” Art Journal, Winter 2010.

[60] John Brockton. “About the HEAD Poster.” Edge (November 6, 2018).

[61] John Markoff. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005).

[62] Thomas Rid. The Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).

[63] Ibid.

[64] Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 467.

[65] Nevill Drury, “Magic and Cyberspace: Fusing Technology and Magical Consciousness in the Modern World” Esoterica. IV (2002) p. 99.

[66] M. Mitchell Waldrop. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001). p. 470.

[67] Erik Davis. TechGnosis. p.166.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Timothy Leary. Chaos and Cyberculture (Berkeley: Ronin, 1994) p. 42.

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia