Global Brain  

Peter Thiel confessed, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[1] According to Google CEO and Bilderberg attendee Eric Schmidt, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”[2] Likewise, Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg claims that privacy is was no longer a “social norm.”[3] Those rules apply only for the rest of us, because the directly contradict Thiel’s statements. Thiel is now the Bilderberg’s most prominent member, as part of their elite Steering Committee who decide on attendees. Explaining the group’s need for privacy, Thiel explained:

We need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent. Libertarianism is not synonymous with radical transparency; that’s often an argument the Stasi would make in East Germany where everything had to be monitored by society,” whereas in “smaller groups, where not everything is being monitored, it’s how you can have very honest conversations, and how you can think better about the future.[4]

Thiel not only founded Paypal and the CIA-backed Palantir but sits on Facebook’s board. According to Newton Lee, author of Facebook Nation, platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube are leading the way towards Total Information Awareness (TIA), a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office established by DARPA in 2002. Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA aimed to digitally collect detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they were committed. TIA was the aim of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) established by DARPA in 2002. Eerily, the IAO’s logo employed the Masonic pyramid and all-seeing eye of the reverse side of the dollar bill casting its vision over the globe, with Francis Bacon’s scientia est potestia (“knowledge itself is power”) as a motto. Disturbingly, Zuckerberg recently recommended Henry Kissinger’s World Order:

[It’s] about foreign relations and how we can build peaceful relationships throughout the world. This is important for creating the world we all want for our children, and that’s what I’m thinking about these days.[5]

Cybernetics, eugenics, Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere,” interest in modern computing, psychedelics and the occult have combined in a modern manifestation known as transhumanism. The creation of the personal computer were merely a milestone, a stepping-stone to a grander ambition of replicating the human mind by creating a thinking machine. By achieving artificial intelligence, in fulfillment of Norbert Wiener’s dream, would be to make man a god. Ultimately, man would create a thinking machine that would become omniscient, and by tapping into the totality of human knowledge, through Google and Wikipedia, and through the use of the Internet and various “social-networking” applications like Facebook, Twitter, and so on, it would be possible to track the actions of every human on earth, actualizing the Masonic All-Seeing Eye.

As Jacob Silverman wrote in “Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley” for the Washington Post, to understand where the cyber-libertarian ideology came from, we have to understand the influence of “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by former Grateful Dead Perry Barlow’s 1996 . “Perhaps more than any other,” writes Silverman, “it’s his philosophy—which melded countercultural utopianism, a rancher’s skepticism toward government and a futurist’s faith in the virtual world—that shaped the industry.”[6] The language of Barlow’s manifesto was derived from Teilhard de Chardin, whom he admired:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind [Noos]. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Similar ideas were express by Timothy Leary. In 1990, Leary explained that his “vision of God” was depicted in the last scene in cyberpunk author William Gibson’s book Neuromancer. Articulating a vision that would mirror that of Teilhard de Chardin, according to Leary, “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.”[7] In 1995, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg declared in Wired, “Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.”[8] As Erik Davis explained about Wired in TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information:

From its first issue, the magazine’s infectious and often absurdly gung ho enthusiasm for both the Internet and the global technoeconomy has been informed with a kind of secularized Teilhardian fervor. Along with Kevin Kelly’s paeans to the coming neo-biological civilization, Wired regular John Perry Barlow is also a hard-core Teilhard fan, who announces in the magazine’s pages that “the point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organization of Mind.” And in an online interview, the magazine’s cofounder Louis Rossetto tipped his hat to Teilhard and the Jesuit’s influence on Internet culture.[9]

The transhumanists view the attainment of supreme artificial intelligence as heralding the advent of what they call the “singularity,” a term first coined by John von Newmann. The so-called singularity, which is the equivalent of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, according to transhumanists, will mark the moment when man will have evolved into a post-human existence through “mind uploading,” having achieved immortality by being merged with the Internet, being likened to the New Age concept of a “collective consciousness,” or “global brain.”

Like MK-Ultra, the personal computer was a project of the Cybernetics Group, and designed to provide the ultimate tool of social control. Knowing that the rest of society would easily recognize the pervasive deployment of computers in every household as an intrusion of “Big Brother,” the hippie counterculture was aligned with the nascent technology of culture of California, to market the computer instead as a tool of personal liberation. At the root of it was the idea of “spiritual evolution,” where by networking every human individual on the planet, and collecting into it the summation of human knowledge, the Internet would be envisioned as the collective consciousness, the end-point of millenarian expectations of the Kabbalah, where man becomes or creates God.

It is the occult project of creating a golem, like Dr. Frankenstein producing life from inanimate matter. Underlying all of the efforts of the Cybernetics Group was the absurd belief that the human mind was a machine, and a Tower-of-Babel-like conviction that its functioning could be reverse engineered and eventually surpassed by computers. The pioneer in this project, known among its members as the “Man-Machine Project,” was John von Neumann, one of the Cybernetics Group’s leaders, and known for his work in mathematics and computer science. According to Jeffrey Steinberg, in From Cybernetics to Littleton:

For John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, the core of the Cybernetics Group project was the development of computers, and the prospect of combining high-speed computers with so-called Artificial Intelligence, to literally “program” the human race. Underlying all of these efforts was the unshakable, albeit preposterous conviction, most avidly presented by von Neumann, that there was nothing sacred about the human mind, and that the human brain was a machine, whose functioning could be replicated, and eventually surpassed, by computers.

For the transhumanists, the Internet is not just an agglomeration of inert information, but poses the possibility of humanity creating a collective consciousness of the mystics. Effectively, transhumanism is the hallucination arrived at by computer scientists on drugs. As psychedelic drugs impede the ability to discern reality from imagination, they often lead to the mistaken attribution of life, or even “divinity,” to inanimate objects, like a computer program. The ultimate foolish dream of the transhumanists is that with the creation of “cyberspace,” we’ll be able to enter the “Pleroma,” the mystical realm of the ancient Gnostics, by “uploading” our minds to the Internet. Thus, the Internet will have come to serve as a totality of human knowledge, the omniscient collective consciousness of Teilhard de Chardin, also known as the  “Global Brain.”

Like Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, who also exercised an important influence at Esalen, described a progression from inanimate matter to a future state of Divine consciousness. What de Chardin refers to as the Omega Point, Aurobindo referred to as the Supermind. Teilhard de Cardin’s Omega Point also influenced José Argüelles, who in 1987 organized the Harmonic Convergence associated with the 2012 phenomenon at Sedona in Arizona, based on the concept of the same name from Blavatsky successor, Alice Bailey.

Ultimately, the vision for the Internet was the mystical idea that dated back to William James, the American Transcendetalits’ World-Soul, and Maurice Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness.” Similar ideas were also developed in 1912 by French philosopher Émile Durkheim, who argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that society constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over space and time. Other antecedents include H.G. Wells’ concept of “world brain.” In World Brain, a collection of essays and addresses, dating from the period of 1936–38, Wells describes his vision of a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent “World Encyclopaedia” that could help “world citizens” make the best use of universal information resources in order to contribute to world peace.

In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke, who was also inspired by de Chardin, 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 encyclopaedia, 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.[10]

   Arthur C. Clarke, along with OTO member Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, is considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction.[11] 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.”

Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan, who was inspired by 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.” According to McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man:

The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.[12]

As Erik Davis remarked in TechGnosis, “Some Christians, especially those with a brute Protestant conviction in the rock-solid inerrancy of the biblical word, would concur with Teilhard that our headlong flight toward planetization is part of a master plan.” [13] Davis was commenting on Marshall McLuhan’s 1969 interview in Playboy, where McLuhan mentioned that computer networks hold out the promise of creating “a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.” McLuhan clarified: “In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”[14]

However, as Davis pointed out, in a letter to synarchist Jacques Maritain, McLuhan flip-flopped on the idealism he had earlier expressed:

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal foster the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body [of Christ], a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this world is a very great electric engineer.[15]

The relationship between the Global Brain and the Internet, and its connection to the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, is explained in The Lost Symbol by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, a fellow alumnus of Exeter with Stewart Brand and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. There is an important section from the novel, which is based on revealing the secret of Freemasonry, where Willis Harman’s Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), named after the Noosphere of Teilhard, plays a central role. Here the character Katherine Solomon explains the significance of Noetics:

…two heads are better than one… and yet two heads are not twice better, they are many, many times better. Multiple minds working in unison magnify a thought’s effect… exponentially. This is the inherent power of prayer groups, healing circles, singing in unison, and worshipping en masse. The idea of universal consciousness is no ethereal New Age concept. It’s a hard-core scientific reality… and harnessing it has the potential to transform our world. This is the underlying discovery of Noetic Science. What’s more, it’s happening right now. You can feel it all around you. Technology is linking us in ways we never imagined possible: Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, and others—all blend to create a web of interconnected minds…

God is found in the collection of Many… rather than in the One.

Elaborating on the “Gaia hypothesis,” physicist and philosopher Peter Russell coined the term “global brain” in 1982 in his book by the same name. How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986 by David Andrews, who presented the idea of a component of social networks called an Information Routing Group (IRG). The paper envisaged that due to the principle of six degrees of separation, specific messages sent by a particular member to members of his local group, could eventually be routed to all of the IRG, overcoming geographical and social limitations as well as solving the Relevance Paradox. Although the idea was proposed before the advent of the Internet, personal computers and modems were conceived as mediating contact.

   Also known as “collective intelligence,” the notion has more recently been examined by the French philosopher Pierre Lévy, who introduced the concept in his 1994 book Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Lévy’s 1995 book, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, develops the conception of “the virtual” from philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Additionally, Doug Engelbart began using the term “Collective IQ” in the mid-1990s as a measure of collective intelligence, to focus attention on the opportunity for business and society to pro-actively raise their Collective IQ.[16]

The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Belgian cyberneticist Francis Heylighen and his PhD student Johan Bollen in 1996. Heylighen is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a Global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. Principia Cybernetica is an international cooperation of scientists in the field of cybernetics and systems science, especially known for their Principia Cybernetica Web website. The organization is associated with the American Society for Cybernetics, founded in 1964 by neurophysiologist Warren Sturgis McCulloch, one of the original members of the Cybernetics Group, who had assisted Puharich’s work at the Round Table Foundation. Principia Cybernetica have dedicated their organization to what they call “a computer-supported evolutionary-systemic philosophy, in the context of the transdisciplinary academic fields of Systems Science and Cybernetics.”[17]

In Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (1997), George Dyson, who was Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, expands upon the premise of X Club member Samuel Butler’s 1863 article of the same name, and suggests that the Internet is a living, sentient being. According to a reviewer:

Dyson's main claim is that the evolution of a conscious mind from today's technology is inevitable. It is not clear whether this will be a single mind or multiple minds, how smart that mind would be, and even if we will be able to communicate with it. He also clearly suggests that there are forms of intelligence on Earth that we are currently unable to understand. From the book: “What mind, if any, will become apprehensive of the great coiling of ideas now under way is not a meaningless question, but it is still too early in the game to expect an answer that is meaningful to us.”[18]

In 2000, Howard Bloom wrote The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. Bloom is a former publicist for musicians like Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, AC/DC, Simon & Garfunkel, Prince, Billy Joel, Styx, Earth, Wind & Fire and Kiss. In The Lucifer Principle (1995), Bloom argues that social groups, not individuals, are the primary “unit of selection” on genes and human psychological development. According to Bloom, both competition between groups and competition between individuals shape the evolution of the genome. Bloom “explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture” and argues that “evil is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric.”[19]

In the Roots of Radical Theology (1988), John Charles Cooper says that Teilhard de Chardin, “taught that the god to be worshipped is the one who will arise out of the evolving human race.”[20]  Similarly, as explained by Heylighen in The Global Brain as a New Utopia, this global mind will serve as a new God:

Although most researchers have addressed the global brain idea from a scientific or technological point of view, authors like Teilhard de Chardin [1955] and Russell [1995] have explored some of its spiritual aspects. Similar to many mystical traditions, the global brain idea holds the promise of a much enhanced level of consciousness and a state of deep synergy or union that encompasses humanity as a whole.  Theists might view this state of holistic consciousness as a union with God. Humanists might see it as the creation, by humanity itself, of an entity with God-like powers. Followers of the Gaia hypothesis have suggested that the “living Earth” of which we are all part deserves awe and worship; it therefore could form the basis of a secular, ecologically inspired religion. The Global Brain vision may offer a similar sense of belonging to a larger whole and of an encompassing purpose.[21]

Heylighen presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels, where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on “Evolution, Complexity and Cognition” and the Global Brain Institute with Ben Goertzel. Goertzel is an American author, mathematician and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. An advocate of psychedelics, Goertzel is also on the Advisory Board of the Timothy Leary Archive maintained by Michael Horowitz, father of Wynona Ryder. Teilhard’s concept of the Noosphere is also currently being researched as part of the Princeton Global Consciousness Project (GCP), which is privately funded through IONS. GCP monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events, or periods of focused attention by large numbers of people.

Highland Group 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed has revealed in an article titled “How the CIA made Google,” the search giant was a defence department project that has its roots in a powerful group known as the Highlands Group, under the stewardship Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), and DARPA . According to the Pentagon’s 1997 Annual Report to the President and the Congress under a section titled “Information Operations,” (IO) the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had authorized the “establishment of the Highlands Group of key DoD, industry, and academic IO experts” to coordinate IO across federal military intelligence agencies.

Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by retired US Navy captain Dick O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry.  After retiring from government in 2003, Perry joined the board of directors of one of the most powerful defense contractors in the country, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which has partnered with Highlands. SAIC changed its name to Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary. SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense contractors in the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community, especially the NSA. A founding member of the Highlands Forum was CIA consultant Jeffrey Cooper, now chief innovation officer at SAIC/Leidos.

The CIA’s remote viewing program was transferred from SRI to SAIC, where it continued from 1992 to 1994, when it was given the name of Operation STAR GATE.[22] SAIC was awarded a sole source contract to procure Phenomenological Research and Analysis Services for the DIA, deemed as the one capable source due to experience and national security considerations. SAIC reportedly had “vast foreign research contacts that greatly enhance successful accomplishment of this effort.”[23] Their principle researcher was Edwin May, a veteran with twenty years of experience in SRI research, who became head of the program after Hal Puthoff left in 1985. May is internationally known for his work in parapsychology. Starting in August 1974, he spent nearly a year in India researching purported psychic phenomena with Yogis and other Masters.[24] Under May, the SAIC claimed to have established that the interruption of Anomalous Cognition signal (AC) can diminish alpha waves generated while the brain is idle. They called this event-related desynchronization (ERD), and concluded that AMP [Anomalous Mental Phenomena] can be used to remotely influence biological systems.[25]

In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s “ideas lab.”[26] In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, “Toward a methodology for perception management.” In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander records that O’Neill’s paper outlined for the first time a strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare (IW). O’Neill repeatedly told his audience at a 2001 seminar at Harvard that his job as Forum president was to scope case studies from real companies across the private sector, like eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to figure out the basis of US ‘Information Superiority’ — ”how to dominate” the information market — and leverage this for “what the president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the DoD and the strategic review.”[27]

The co-chair and “Yoda” of the Highlands Forum has been Andy Marshall, who headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. Appointed to the position by Nixon, Marshall remained in office until his retirement on January 2, 2015. Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts in The Last Warrior describe Marshall as “an intellectual giant comparable to such nuclear strategists as Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and Albert Wohlstetter.”[28]

Marshall, who was strongly influenced by Friedrich Hayek, joined the RAND in 9149, at the behest of mentor W. Allen Wallis, who served as the treasurer of the Mont Pelerin Society, and who maintained a lifelong friendship with Milton Friedman, Aaron Director and George Stigler.[29] In 2002, Wired reporter Douglas McGray described Marshall as “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials, and added that “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz”  were among Marshall’s “star protégés.”[30] A third co-chair was Anthony J. Tether, the director DARPA, and a Rumsfeld appointee. Before joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s Advanced Technology Sector.

Forum delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions , including ”captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.”[31] Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND, Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric and Enron. Other participants have included David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Le Cercle member and Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.

In-Q-Tel

In 1994 ,  the same year the Highlands Forum was founded, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then two young PhD students at Stanford University, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA. While Page’s funding was provided through the NSF, Brin was funded through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman, who was in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA’s Intelligent Integration of Information program.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Brin reported regularly to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, both representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining. Steinheiser represented the CIA’s Office of Research and Devepment (ORD). Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and information management for MITRE Corporation, a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.

According to Thuraisingham, in addition to the private sector, Brin’s seed-funding was provided in part by a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that she was administering when she was at the MITRE along with Steinheiser. The primary sponsors of MDDS were three agencies the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community’s Community Management Staff (CMS), which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence.

Robert Steele, former senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy director of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, said that Steinheiser, who was an old colleague of his, was the CIA’s main liaison at Google and had arranged its early funding when it was founded in 1998.[32] In the acknowledgements to her book, Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, Thuraisingham writes that she and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with DARPA on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google.

In September 1998, Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, both connected to DARPA, invested $100,000 each in Google. Bechtolsheim’s pioneering DARPA-funded research at Stanford was the foundation of Bechtolsheim’s establishment of Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded with William Joy. In 1996, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems to co-found Granite Systems with Cheriton, whose research at Stanford had received the support of the DARPA for over 20 years.

Cisco and Granite executives are intimately connected to the Pentagon.[33] Lawrence Zuriff, a managing partner of Granite, was a participant of the Highlands Forums. Zuriff had previously been an SAIC contractor from 1993 to 1994, working with the Pentagon on national security issues, specifically for Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. During his time at SAIC, Zuriff wrote a paper titled “Understanding Information War,” delivered at a SAIC-sponsored US Army Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.

After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25 million in equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.”[34]

Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed “a close relationship” with In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, named in reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond. The idea was to essentially replace the functions once performed by the ORD , by mobilizing the private sector to develop information technology solutions for the entire intelligence community. In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. Gilman Louie, is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel , was a participant of the Highlands Forums. As was fellow board member Dr. Anita Jones, a CFR member and MITRE trustee , who served as director of DARPA and head of research and engineering at the Pentagon. From 1987 to 1993, she also served on SAIC’s board of directors. From 1993 to 1997, she also co-chaired the Highlands Forum. She was also on the board of the NSF.[35]

In-Q-Tel has been investing in companies engaged in social media mining and surveillance. Dataminr streams data from Twitter in search of trends for law enforcement agencies and hedge funds. Geofeedia collects social media messages in order to follow activists for police departments and corporations. Pathar is hired by the FBI to mine social media in order to determine networks and signs of radicalization. Netbase scans billions of sources online and Recorded Future monitors the world’s online traffic to predict future events.[36]

Total Information Awarness

 Shortly after 9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief technology officer at SAIC and deputy director of the Information Systems Office (ISO) at DARPA, teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the Total Information Awareness (TIA) surveillance program.[37] TIA was the aim of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) established in 2002 by DARPA, to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security. The goal was to integrate components from previous and brand new government intelligence and surveillance programs with data mining knowledge gleamed from the private sector to create a resource for the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement communities.[38]

The IAO was headed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Poindexter was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran–Contra affair, but his convictions were reversed on appeal in 1991. According to David Teacher, besides the channels to Reagan via CIA director William Casey, Le Cercle and Brian Crozier’s 6I also liaised directly with Reagan’s successive National Security Advisors, Dick Allen, William P. Clark, Bud McFarlane and Poindexter.[39] Poindexter, who holds a leadership positions within the Order of Hubertus is also the owner of the mysterious Cibolo Creek Ranch, which has links to Bohemian Grove and where Scalia is said to have been murdered by young boy he had sexually abused.[40]

Following public criticism that this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, believes the downfall of the program was largely attributable to the backlash against the logo.[41] However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.

TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public opposition after the program was exposed in the media, but the following year Poindexter participated in a Pentagon Highlands Group. Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is “quietly thriving” at the National Security Agency (NSA).[42] Companies that were contracted to work on TIA included the Science Applications International, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Schafer Corporation, SRS Technologies, Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, ASI Systems International, and Syntek Technologies.[43]

Palantir

According to Wired, Thiel and his business partner Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. “I told them I thought they had an interesting idea,” says Poindexter. After 9/11, co-founder Alex Karp had reconnected with Thiel, who had the idea that Silicon Valley should do something to improve national security and secure civil liberties.[44] Karp has a doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Frankfurt University, where his advisor was Jürgen Habermas, a leading thinker of the Frankfurt School.[45]

Thiel and Karp then founded the CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, headquartered in Palo Alto, which specializes in big data analysis for the intelligence community, and which supposedly helped to locate Osama bin Laden.[46] Thiel named the company after the crystal ball used by evil lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Thiel saw Palantir as a “mission-oriented company” which could apply software similar to PayPal’s fraud recognition systems to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.”[47] Karp counts former CIA director George Tenet as a friend, as well as Tenet’s employer, Herb Allen, who runs Allen & Co, a Palantir investor. Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA.[48] Poindexter also helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.”[49]

A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir’s clients included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and Special Operations Command.[50] Although the company denies the connection, the majority of security analysts are convinced that Palantir is the principal company behind the design of software used for the NSA’s PRISM program.[51] PRISM’s existence was revealed when The Washington Post and The Guardian published leaked documents by Edward Snowden, which exposed the involvement of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”[52]

Palantir, an internal document showed, also completed an engagement in 2014 with News Corp. Murdoch had visited Palantir, as had Gerard Baker, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal which is owned by News Corp. and William Lewis, the paper’s publisher. Palantir’s work for News Corp included efforts to reduce customer churn across three publications. News Corp was “pleased” with Palantir’s work, News Corp spokesperson James Kennedy told BuzzFeed News in an email.[53]

Google Earth

According to Lee, “Facial recognition, location tracking, ambient social apps on GPS-enabled devices, Google Street View, digital footprints, and data mining are some key elements in information awareness.”[54] On March 29, 2012, the Obama administration announced more than $200 million in funding for ‘‘Big Data Research and Development Initiative’.’ Information Innovation Office, explains Lee, has replaced the Information Awareness Office. The first wave of agency commitments includes National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Geological Survey, and Department of Defense (including DARPA).

According to Homeland Security Today, Google’s alleged secret relationship with the US intelligence community (IC) was divulged by an IT contractor and confirmed by US intelligence authorities familiar with the matter during the OSS.Net IOP conference near Washington, DC in 2006. The contractor, who spoke on a not-for-attribution basis, said that at least one US intelligence agency he declined to identify was working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort by the IC to sift information of “national security intelligence interest” in the war on terror. The sources, also speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, would not say under what authority the IC had obtained Google’s cooperation, or which intelligence agency were involved. One of the sources did said, however, that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) “has been giving them additional money and guidance and requirements.”[55]

In 2003, Google had begun customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA funding was also being funneled through the NSF to projects that might help create “new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.”[56] The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel. The CIA worked closely with other Intelligence Community organizations to tailor Keyhole’s satellite mapping software to meet their needs.[57]

In-Q-Tel’s director of technical assessment Rob Painter, who played a key role in In-Q-Tel’s Keyhole investment, moved to Google as of July 2005. A former US Army special operations intelligence officer, Painter’s job at In-Q-Tel involved identifying, researching and evaluating “new start-up technology firms that were believed to offer tremendous value to the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.”[58] The NGA had confirmed that its intelligence obtained via Keyhole was used by the NSA to support US operations in Iraq from 2003 onwards.[59]

Under Painter, Google began using the CIA’s Keyhole software developed by In-Q-Tel in developing the advanced satellite mapping software behind Google Earth. In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion-dollar sole-source contract with the NSA’s sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), to use Google Earth for visualization services. Michele Weslander Quaid, who  had served in executive positions at NGA, as well as the National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, became Google’s CTO where she was developing programs to “best fit government agencies’ needs.”[60] Quaid, who is among the several Google executives closely connected with O’Neill, is an ex-CIA contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official.

In 2007, Painter told the Washington Post that Google was “in the beginning stages” of selling advanced secret versions of its products to the US government. “Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community,” the newspaper reported.[61] The Pentagon was already using a version of Google Earth developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin to “display information for the military on the ground in Iraq,” including “mapping out displays of key regions of the country” and outlining “Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as US and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.” Google aimed to sell the government new “enhanced versions of Google Earth” and “search engines that can be used internally by agencies.”[62]

In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space which it shares photographs from with the US military and intelligence communities. In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.” In the same year, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to “evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software.[63]

In April 2010, Germany’s data protection commissioner announced that Google vehicles had been illegally collecting Wi-Fi data. The scandal was referred to as the “Wi-Spy” case. In the process of photographing neighborhoods, Street View Cars were eavesdropping on traffic from unencrypted wireless network, picking up passwords, email messages, medical records, financial information, and audio and video files.[64] This happened after Keyhole’s founder John Hanke moved to Google where he led the Geo division, including Street View and Maps, as vice president for product management. Hanke was later responsible a company called Niantic which was responsible for creating the wildly popular Pokemon Go “augmented reality” game. Hanke had begun Niantic inside Google in 2010 as an autonomous business unit, according to news reports. before the unit was spun off in 2015, when it received $20 million in funding from Google and Nintendo.[65]

As privacy watchdog Electronic Privacy Information Center put it, in a letter of concern to federal regulators, Pokemon Go requires a “trove of sensitive user data.”[66] Hanke had filed a patent in 2012 held by Niantic on a “System and Method for Transporting Virtual Objects in a Parallel Reality Game.” The patent discusses how a game such as Pokemon Go could be used to collect real-world data from a player without them knowing it:

The game objective can be directly linked with a data collection activity. An exemplary game objective directly linked with data collection activity can include a task that involves acquiring information about the real world and providing this information as a condition for completion of the game objective.[67]

The patent also cites an academic paper from the International Journal of Virtual Reality, “Playful Geospatial Data Acquisition by Location-Based Gaming Communities” by Sebastian Matyas, which includes as its introduction the following paragraph:

To our opinion, the real challenge lies in motivating the user to provide the data constantly, even after the exciting appeal of technological innovation at the beginning wears off. The data acquisition process should be entertaining for a possible contributor to engage him in the long run. We convince that entertainment and fun are an important design aspect of such data collecting services.[68]

Jigsaw

One year after Thiel and Larry Summers became members of Bilderberg, Sheryl Sandberg was recruited to be COO of Facebook in 2008. After working for the World Bank, Sandberg worked as Chief of Staff of the Treasury for the Clinton administration, under then Treasure Secretary Larry Summers. Facebook’s Vice President is Harvard educated lawyer, Elliot Schrage, who was previously at Google as the Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, and before that served in foreign policy at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and as an advisor to several global corporations on issues of corporate social responsibility.[69]

Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which involved the sharing of information between American tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.” Schmidt and Brin corresponded about ESF with NSA chief General Keith Alexander, a key member of the Defense Industrial Base. The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) as “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements.” The DIB provides “products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”[70]

In mid-May 2011, Assange met with Eric Schmidt, his then girlfriend Lisa Shields, vice president of the CFR, and Jared Cohen, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the CFR. Schmidt, who has attended Bilderberg meetings four years in a row, had just been appointed Google’s CEO.[71] Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies including Byzromotti Design, Bell Labs, Zilog, and Xerox’s PARC. He worked at Sun Microsystems, and then became CEO of Novell. In 1999 Schmidt joined the board of the New America Foundation, eventually becoming chairman of its board of directors in 2008. The foundation’s other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the CFR, include neoconservative Francis Fukuyama; Rita Hauser, who served on the Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead, a US security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the CFR and CSIS, the White House Fellows program and Bono’s ONE Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geostrategist, former chair of the US Department of Energy’s Task Force.[72]

The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen’s former boss at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter is member of the CFR and the bipartisan Development Council of CSIS. She was subsequently the first woman to serve as the Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Slaughter is also a member of the Atlantic Council, along with Henry Kissinger, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, Brent Scowcroft and Paul G. Kaminski, Founding Director of In-Q-Tel.

Cohen earned a master’s degree in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton. According to The New York Times magazine, right before his departure Cohen was one of the participating architects of what was labeled in 2010 as “21st century statecraft” along with Richard Boly and several foreign service officers in the Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy.[73]

On his CFR adjunct staff page, Cohen listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”[74] It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran.[75] Schmidt and Cohen co-wrote a policy piece for the CFR’ journal Foreign Affairs, praising the potential of digital technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy. Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,” Schmidt and Cohen claimed that: “Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies… Faced with these opportunities, democratic governments have an obligation to join together while also respecting the power of the private and nonprofit sectors to bring about change.”[76]

Cohen is the CEO of Jigsaw, previously Google Ideas, which describes itself as Google’s in-house “think/do tank.”[77] Jigsaw is a technology incubator created by Google, and now operated as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. According to Schmidt, Jigsaw’s mission “is to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks.”[78] Jigsaw developed the Redirect Method, an open source methodology that leverages Google’s AdWords platform and YouTube to target potential ISIS recruits and dissuade them from joining the group. [79] In May 2016, Jigsaw announced it had partnered with Vice News on a five-part documentary series called Blackout to examine free expression around the world.[80]

Jigsaw also hosted a number of conferences, the most recent of which was the Conflict in a Connected World Roundtable Series, in partnership with the CFR’s Center of Preventative Action. It has come under scrutiny for its links with the US State Department and its regime change activities.[81] Schmidt and a number of top Google execs informed the intelligence agency Stratfor about Google’s activities and internal communication regarding “regime change” in the Middle East, according to Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks and obtained by Al-Akhbar. In an email addressed to the deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton dated on July 25, 2012, Cohen’s revealed that Jigsaw was working on a project, together with Al Jazeera, to track defectors of the Syrian Army with the explicit goal of “encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.”[82]

Singularity

An important exponent of the transhumanist agenda is Ray Kurzweil, a head of engineering at Google, under whose stewardship the company, which normally subscribes to the dictum of “don’t do evil,” has recently broadened the scope of its business to cover the gamut of transhumanist interests, including artificial intelligence (AI) and even longevity. Thiel says of himself, “I’m not like Ray Kurzweil where the singularity is near and all you have to do is sit back and eat the popcorn. It’s something that we have to choose to work on and we have to make it happen.”[83] Thiel also explained that he was taking human-growth hormone pills as part of his plan to live 120 years, and that he was interested in parabiosis, which includes the practice of getting transfusions of blood from a younger person, as a means of improving health and potentially reversing aging.[84]

Thiel is also on the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Founded in 2000, MIRI advocates ideas initially put forth by I. J. Good and Vernor Vinge regarding an “intelligence explosion,” or Singularity, yet another version of the End Times, which MIRI thinks may follow the creation of sufficiently advanced AI.[85] One of the directors of MIRI was Ray Kurzweil, a head of engineering at Google and the prophet of transhumanism. According to Kurzweil, once the Singularity has been reached, machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards, Kurzweil says, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe, effectively becoming God. In 2006, the MIRI, along with the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, the Center for Study of Language and Information, KurzweilAI.net, and Peter Thiel, co-sponsored the Singularity Summit at Stanford. The 2012 Singularity Summit was held at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, in San Francisco.[86]

A member of MIRI’s board of Research Advisors is Nick Bostrom, who is considered one of the founders of the transhumanist movement. In 1998, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), which has since changed its name to Humanity+. In 2004, he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bostrom was named in Foreign Policy’s 2009 list of top global thinkers “for accepting no limits on human potential.”[87] In the A History of Transhumanist Thought, Bostrom traces the history of transhumanism to alchemy, Francis Bacon and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Bostrom argues that if artificial intelligence can surpass that of humans, then this new superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth, which would mean an existential catastrophe for humans. In January 2015, he donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, an organization focused on challenges posed by advanced technologies.[88]

Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation

MIRI’s Director of Research was Humanity+ board member Ben Goertzel. With Belgian cyberneticist Francis Heylighen, Goertzel directs the transhumanist Global Brain Institute. Along with Marvin Minsky at MIT, Goertzel’s research has been backed by Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Established in 2000 by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the foundation funded Martin Nowak’s research at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, which studies the evolution of molecular biology with the use of mathematics. Nowak is the Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a type of updated eugenics, at Harvard. Epstein actively funded several universities and science institutes including the Santa Fe Institute, MIT and MIT’s Media Lab.

Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation held conferences at the luxury estate on Epstein’s private Caribbean island of Little St James, referred to as “Sin Island,” where Epstein is to have procured “sex slaves” for various high-powered personalities. Recent conferences have included topics such as gravity, language evolution and global threats to the Earth. Many notable scientists have attended the conferences, including Minsky, Gerard ‘t Hooft and Stephen Hawking.[89] John Brockman, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Katinka Matson, and Richard Dawkins flew to a TED conference in 2002 aboard Epstein’s plane.[90] Brockman is a literary agent and author who founded the Edge Foundation, an organization aimed to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Goleman and Jared Diamond. Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, who is referred to as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism,” along with Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.[91]

In 2019, Evgeny Morozov suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein the paedophile financier who died awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking girls, who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer fee. The Edge Organization Inc. is an online group of award-winning academics and authors in the sciences and social sciences.[92] Brockman had belonged in the 1960s to the New York multimedia scene around USCO, which involved John Cage, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol, and which had teamed up with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner.[93] It was Cage who introduced Brockman to Norbert Wiener’s book cybernetics. In the 1980s, Brockman became rich and famous as an agent for physicists, genetic scientists and computer scientists. In the 1990s, his publishing company, Brockman Inc., was the center of a global network of “digerati.” These included Heinz von Foerster, an architect of cybernetics and one of the members of the Macy conferences, as well as Gregory Bateson and Steward Brand. Referring to his network, Brockman explained, “no one in New York had a clue that there was something happening. That there was a consciousness or mindset that had evolved, and you could connect all these people.”[94]

In 1993, Brockman’s network was hit by a bomb attack. The victim was a computer scientists David Gelernter. Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber, a serial killer targeting academics and technologists, had been a subject at age sixteen of experiments conducted at Harvard by Timothy Leary’s associate, former chief OSS psychologist Henry A. Murray. From the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Murray was responsible for the ethically questionable, CIA-sponsored MK-Ultra experiments in which twenty-two undergraduates were used as guinea pigs. Among other purposes, Murray’s experiments focused on measuring people’s reaction under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks.[95] Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the vehicle used to cause high levels of stress and distress. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later crimes.

Morozov proposed that Brockman may be the reason why so many prominent academics became associated with Epstein, like Marvin Minsky and Joi Ito. Along with John McCarthy, in the 1950s Minsky founded the AI Project at MIT, a forebearer of the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Epstein’s accuser Virginia Roberts Guiffre said she was told to have sex with former Minsky on Jeffrey Epstein’s island in the Virgin Islands when she was only seventeen.[96] Ito is the former director of the MIT Media Lab, and a former professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner. The Lab gained popularity since 1988, when Stewart Brand published The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T., and its work was regularly featured in technology journals in the 1990s. Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health and the The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019, following allegations of financial ties to Epstein. Ito admitted to taking $525,000 in funding from Epstein for the Lab, and permitting Epstein to invest $1.2 million in Ito’s investment funds.[97]

Between 2001 and 2015, Edge Foundation received $638,000 from Epstein’s various foundations. In many of those years, Epstein was Edge’s sole donor.[98] In 2004, Brockman hosted a dinner at the Indian Summer restaurant in Monterey, Calif., where Mr. Epstein was introduced to scientists, including Seth Lloyd, the MIT physicist. Also at the Indian Summer dinner, according to an account on the website of Mr. Brockman’s Edge Foundation, were the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Jeff Bezos. Scientists gathered at dinner parties at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. Epstein attracted an illustrious list of scientists, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the MIT theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate.[99]

Bill Gates also began a regular friendship with Epstein after he had been convicted of sex crimes. Employees of Gates’s foundation also paid multiple visits to Epstein’s mansion. Melanie Walker, who had known Epstein since 1992 and worked as his science adviser, joined the Gates Foundation as senior program officer in 2006. Walker introduced Epstein to Boris Nikolic, an immunologist, biotech venture capitalist and former fellow at Harvard Medical School, who was the Gates Foundation’s science adviser, and the two men became friendly. Beginning in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions, including at least three times at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Gates emailed colleagues after his first get-together with Epstein, on January 31, 2011, when they were joined by Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden and her 15-year-old daughter. Gates commented by email: “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late.”[100]

Epstein and Eva dated for years before in 1994 she married the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, who was a friend and business associate of Epstein’s. Epstein told associates in 2014 that if he ever married, he would want it to be with Celina Dubin, Eva’s then 19-year-old daughter.[101] In 2019, unsealed documents revealed connections between Dubin and Jeffrey Epstein, including allegations of involvement in his sexual abuse ring. Rinaldo Rizzo, the former house manager for the Dubins, described a 2005 encounter at the Dubin’s home with a 15-year-old girl employed as a nanny. Rizzo said the girl, who was shaking and crying, told him that she was pressured by Ghislaine to have sex with Epstein, with Maxwell taking her passport when she refused.[102] A month after being hired, according to The Daily Beast, the Dubins took the girl with them to Sweden, where she was dropped off at an airport.[103] In 2012, Dubin and Eva signed The Giving Pledge, created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, which committed them to give away at least 50% of their wealth to charity within their lifetime.[104]

Around 2011, Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about creating the Global Health Investment Fund, a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund to provide “individual and institutional investors the opportunity to finance late-stage global health technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives in low-income countries.”[105] Also in that same year, attendees spotted Gates and Epstein engaged in private conversation at a TED conference in Long Beach, California. In 2013, Gates flew on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Fla., according to a flight manifest. As late as October 2014, Gates donated $2 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. University officials described the gift in internal emails as having been “directed” by Mr. Epstein.[106] Days before Epstein hanged himself in a Manhattan jail cell on August 10 2019, he amended his will and named Nikolic as a fallback executor.[107] After leaving the Gates Foundation in 2014, Nikolic funded more than a dozen firms in gene editing and other health technologies.[108]

Epstein established the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard which studies the evolution of microbiology and diseases through the use of mathematics. He was actively involved in the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, and also sits on the Mind, Brain & Behavior Advisory Committee at Harvard. The IAS is best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein and cybernetics founder John von Neumann. Established during the rise of European fascism, the IAS played a key role in the transfer of intellectual capital from Europe to America, and soon acquired a reputation of being at the pinnacle of academic and scientific life, a reputation it has retained.[109]

Epstein also expressed an interest in eugenics. Epstein often talked about perfecting the human genome, and conveyed his fascination with how certain traits were passed on, and how that could result in superior humans. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to seed the human race with his DNA by inseminating 20 chosen women with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, using his Sante Fe, New Mexico ranch as the “Ground Zero” for his community. According to the NASA scientist Jaron Lanier, a prolific author who is a founder of virtual reality, Epstein based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool. Epstein also expressed an interest in cryogenics. Epstein told an acquaintance that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.[110]

SpaceX

In mid-2014, Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies helped spark public discussion about AI’s long-run social impact, receiving endorsements from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Thiels’ Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in SpaceX. Thiel and Musk are the leading member of what has been termed the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies.

Elon’s mother is Maye Musk, a model for 50 years appearing on the covers of magazines including Time. Raised in South Africa, Maye’s parents, Winnifred Josephine “Wyn” (Fletcher) and Joshua Norman Haldeman, who flew the family around the world in a prop plane in 1952. For over ten years the family would spend time roaming the Kalahari desert in search of its fabled Lost City.[111] The legend involves a theory that the ruins of a long-forgotten city exist somewhere in the desert. In 1885, the Canadian William Leonard Hunt (1838 – 1929), was one of the first Westerners to cross the unexplored portion of the Kalahari. Also known by the stage name The Great Farini, Hunt made his most famous tightrope performances at Niagara Falls during 1860, and was supposedly the first known white man to cross the Kalahari Desert on foot and survive. Upon his return, he showed photographs and wrote a paper about ruins he discovered that appeared to indicate the remains of a lost civilization buried in the sands. He published a book about his experiences in 1886, Through the Kalahari Desert.

Among the books that inspired him, Musk lists the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, the Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom, a book that explores what would happen if computational intelligence surpassed human intelligence.”[112] Bostrom’s book was criticized by NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis for claims that, “intelligence is a potentially infinite quantity with a well-defined, one-dimensional value,” that a superintelligent AI could “easily resist and outsmart the united efforts of eight billion people” and achieve “virtual omnipotence,” and that “though achieving intelligence is more or less easy, giving a computer an ethical point of view is really hard.”[113] In an interview for at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October 2014, Musk provided the following pronouncement, based on a scenario that recalls Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — Yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.[114]

Musk’s goals include reducing the “risk of human extinction” by “making life multiplanetary” by setting up a human colony on Mars.[115] Musk stated that he believes the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions.”[116] “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer,” writes Tad Friend of The New Yorker. “Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”[117] If we aren’t actually living through a simulation, Musk added, then all human life is probably about to come to an end and so we should hope that we are living in one. “Otherwise, if civilization stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilization,” he said at the Recode conference. Sam Altman, who runs Y Combinator which helps develop tech companies, and who also co-founded a nonprofit called OpenAI with Musk, seemed to echo that sentiment and told the New Yorker that he was concerned that the devices that surround us might lead to the extinction of all consciousness in the universe. According to Altman, the best scenario for dealing with that is a “merge,” when our brains and computers become one, perhaps by having our brains uploaded into the cloud. [118]

Quantum Computing

An important proponent of the idea of a Singularity is Geordie Rose, the founder of D-Wave, a quantum computing company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, which is the first company in the world to sell quantum computers. D-Wave also shares board members with Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Synthetic Genomics, which is trying to build artificial life. In 2013, NASA, Google, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) started the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the NASA Advanced for research into machine learning and related fields of study.

First introduced in 1957 by theoretical physicist Hugh Everett, the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics asserts that the perplexing reality of quantum superpositions extend across parallel universes.[119] D-Wave’s founder Rose suggests that there is a “mind-boggling” number of such universes, where the laws of physics are the same, but where different decisions were made along the way. As quantum computers encode information in quantum bits, or qubits, whose unique feature is that they can be in a quantum superposition of zero and one states, according to Rose, they are a “nexus” where the parallel universes overlap. The potential of this kind of computing, Rose explains, is that, “the shadows of these parallel worlds overlap with ours, and if we are smart enough, we can dive into them and grab their resources and pull them back into ours, to make an effect in our world.”[120]

The D-Wave Two used by Google and NASA, Rose explains, knowing full-well the implications of his observation, emits a sound about every second that sounds almost like a heart-beat. “It feels” he adds, “like an altar to an alien god.”[121] Rose then finishes his talk with 3 predictions. First, that by 2018 NASA will have found a livable planet within 40 light years from Earth, and “serious people” will start discussion how we get there, and they’ll be using a D-Wave machine to do so. Second, is that by 2028 we’ll be able to verify the existence of parallel universes. Third, also by 2028, and that is presumably not a coincidence, AI machines will exist that can do anything humans can, and quantum computers will have played a critical role in that development. According to Rose, “I believe that humanity is on the cusp of the most important technological, societal revolution that has ever occurred. And that’s when we got to the point when the machines that we build outpace us in every respect. I don’t mean that they are better calculators. I don’t mean that they are better at searching. I mean everything.”[122]

However, in 2007 Umesh Vazirani, a professor at University of California (UC) Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory upon which D-Wave is based, questioned the validity of their assertions and whether or not it was actually a quantum computer.[123] In January 2014 researchers at UC Berkeley and IBM published a classical model reproducing the D-Wave machine’s observed behavior, suggesting that it may not be a quantum computer.[124] Other independent researchers found that different software packages running on a single core of a desktop computer can solve those same problems as fast or faster than D-Wave’s computers.[125] A study published in Science in June 2014, described as “likely the most thorough and precise study that has been done on the performance of the D-Wave machine,” found “no quantum speedup” across the entire range of their tests, and only inconclusive results when looking at subsets of the tests.”[126]

[1] Klint Finley. “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries.” TechCrunch (22 November 2013).

[2] “Inside the Mind of Google.” CNBC (December 3, 2009).

[3] Bobbie Johnson. “Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder.” The Guardian (January 11, 2010).

[4] WeAreChange. “BREAKING: Peter Thiel Goes On The Record About Bilderberg.” YouTube (Published on Jun 11, 2016).

[5] Richard Feloni. “Why Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to read Henry Kissinger’s book about world order.” Business Insider (December 10, 2015).

[6] Jacob Silverman. “Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley.” Washington Post (March 20, 2015).

[7] Henry Makow. “The CIA, Drugs, & Culture Control.” HenryMakow.com (May 1, 2014).

[8] Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg. “A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain.” Wired. Issue 3.06 | (June 1995)

[9] Davis. TechGnosis, p. 296.

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

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

[12] Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Frank Zingrone (editors) Essential McLuhan (BasicBooks, 1995) p. 321.

[13] Erik Davis. TechGnosis. p. 309.

[14] Ibid. p. 253.

[15] Ibid. p. 254.

[16] Engelbart’s 1994 definition of ‘Collective IQ’ – found on Slide 4. Retrieved from  http://www.archive.org/stream/boostingcollecti00drdo#page/n9/mode/2up]

[17] Principia Cybernetica Masthead Last modified Oct 17, 2006. Accessed Oct 13, 2009

[18] Tal Cohen. Tal Cohen’s Bookshelf (September 30, 1998).

[19] Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History.

[20] John Charles Cooper. Roots of Radical Theology (University Press Of America, 1988).

[21] Francis Heylighen. The global brain as a new utopia. Zukunftsfiguren. (Suhrkamp, Frankurt, 2002) Retrieved from http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/GB-Utopia.pdf

[22] “STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing].” Federation of American Scientists (December 29, 2005).

[23] “JUSTIFICATION AND APPROVAL FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION.” Collection: STARGATE, Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00789R003000200009-8 (July 22, 1993).

[24] “Who is Edwin May?” Parapsychological Association. [accessed October 19, 2017] Retrived from https://archived.parapsych.org/members/e_c_may.html

[25] SIGNIFICANT PRELIMINARY AMP EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS BY THE SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION (SAIC). Document Type: CREST; Collection: STARGATE; Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00789R002600260001-5 (March 4, 1994).

[26] Richard P. O’Neill. “Seminar on Intelligence, Command, and Control.” The Highlands Forum Process (Spring 2001).

[27] Nafeez Ahmed. “How the CIA made Google.” Part 1. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[28] Andrew F. Krepinevich, Barry D. Watts. The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015) p. xviii.

[29] R. M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), pp. 66–7.

[30] Douglas McGray. “The Marshall Plan.” Wired (January 2, 2003).

[31] Nafeez Ahmed. “How the CIA made Google.” Part 1. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Youssef El-Gingihy. “How Silicon Valley, spooks and the super rich took control of the 21st century.” Independent (April 5, 2018).

[37] Shane Harris. “TIA Lives On.” National Journal (February 23, 2006).

[38] John Poindexter. “Overview of the Information Awareness Office.” fas.org. Federation of American Scientists (2 August 2002).

[39] Teacher. Rogue Agents, p. 193.

[40] Fiona Barnett. “Bohemian Grove, Pedo Hunting Parties and Rent Boy Ranch.” (February 22, 2016). Retrieved from https://pedophilesdownunder.com/tag/justice-antonin-scalia/

[41] Matt Kessler. “The Logo That Took Down a DARPA Surveillance Project.” The Atlantic (December 22, 2015).

[42] Shane Harris. “Giving In to the Surveillance State.” The New York Times (August 22, 2012).

[43] Adam Mayle & Alex Knott. “Outsourcing Big Brother: Office of Total Information Awareness relies on private sector to track Americans.” www.publicintegrity.org. Center for Public Integrity (December 17, 2002).

[44] Shane Harris. “Palantir Technologies spots patterns to solve crimes and track terrorists.” Wired (July 31, 2012).

[45] Andy Greenberg. “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut.” Forbes (August 14, 2003).

[46] Carole Cadwalladr. “Peter Thiel: ‘We attribute too much to luck. Luck is an atheistic word for God’.” The Observer (September 21, 2014). p. 8.

[47] Andy Greenberg & Ryan Mac. “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut.” Forbes (August 14, 2013).

[48] Nafeez Ahmed. “How the CIA made Google.” Part 1. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[49] Ibid.

[50] Matt Burns. “Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients.” TechCrunch (January 11, 2015).

[51] Pierluigi Paganini. “Palantir Technologies is considered the principal company behind the design of software used for PRISM program, think of it as the work of a single company is truly an understatement.” Security Affairs (June 17, 2013).

[52] Nicholas Carlson. “PRISM Is Also The Name Of A Product From Palantir, A $5 Billion Tech Startup Funded By The CIA.” Business Insider (June 7, 2013).

[53] William Alden. “Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley's Most Secretive Company.” BuzzFeed (May 6, 2016).

[54] Newton Lee. Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (New York: Springer, 2013), p. 6.

[55] Anthony L. Kimery. “While Fending Off DoJ Subpoena, Google Continues Longstanding Relationship With US Intelligence.” Homeland Security Today (January 25, 2006)

[56] Nafeez Ahmed. “How the CIA made Google.” Part 1. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[57] “CIA’s Impact on Technology.” Cia.gov (July 23, 2012).

[58] Nafeez Ahmed. “Why Google made the NSA.” Part 2. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[59] “In-Q-Tel Announces Strategic Investment in Keyhole.” Keyhole.com (June 25, 2003).

[60] Nafeez Ahmed. “How the CIA made Google.” Part 1. Medium (January 22, 2015).

[61] Sara Kehaulani Goo & Alec Klein. “Google Searches For Government Work.” Washington Post (February 28, 2007).

[62] Ibid.

[63] Julian Assange. “Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems.” Newsweek (October 23, 2014).

[64] “Google-Street-View tours also used for scanning WLAN-networks.” BfDI (April 23, 2010).

[65] Sam Biddle. “Privacy Scandal Haunts Pokemon Go’s CEO.” The Intercept (August 9, 2016).

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid.

[69] LinkedIn profile. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotschrage/

[70] Julian Assange. “Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems.” Newsweek (October 23, 2014).

[71] Charlie Skelton. “Bilderberg conference 2014: eating our politicians for breakfast.” The Guardian (May 30, 2014).

[72] Assange. “Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems.”

[73] Jesse Lichtenstein. “Digital Diplomacy.” The New York Times Magazine (July 16, 2010).

[74] “Jared Cohen.” Council on Foreign Relations (accessed May 13, 2014).

[75] Assange. “Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems.”

[76] Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen. “The Digital Disruption.” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2010 Issue).

[77] Seth Weintraub. “Google to open ‘Google Ideas’ global technology think tank.” Fortune. CNN Money (August 15, 2010).

[78] Eric Schmidt. “Google Ideas Becomes Jigsaw.” Medium (February 16, 2016).

[79] Andy Greenberg. “Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits.” Wired (September 7, 2016).

[80] Gold Hadas. “Vice teams with Alphabet incubator Jigsaw on doc series ‘Blackout’” Politico (May 13, 2016).

[81] Yazan Al-Saadi. “StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change’.” Al-Akhbar English (March 14, 2012).

[82] MintPress News Desk “Google & Al-Jazeera Encouraged Civil War In Syria” MintPress News (March 29, 2016).

[83] Cadwalladr. “Peter Thiel,” p. 8.

[84] Maya Kosoff. “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself With Young People’s Blood.” Vanity Fair (August 1, 2016).

[85] Eliezer Yudkowsky (2013). Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics. Technical report 2013-1 (Berkeley, CA: Machine Intelligence Research Institute). Retrieved from https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf

[86] “Singularity Summit: Logistics.” SingularitySummit.com.

[87] “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers – 73. Nick Bostrom.” Foreign Policy (December 2009).

[88] Danielle Muoio. “Elon Musk just announced a new artificial intelligence research company.” Tech Insider (December 11, 2015).

[89] “Stephen Hawking pictured on Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Island of Sin’”. The Daily Telegraph (January 12, 2015).

[90] Brock Colyar, Kelsey Hurwitz, Charlotte Klein, Ezekiel Kweku, Amy Larocca, Yinka Martins, Adam K. Raymond, Matthew Schneier, Matt Stieb, and James D. Walsh. “Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling? A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York.” New York (July 22, 2019). Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-high-society-contacts.html

[91] "Preview: The Four Horsemen of New Atheism reunited". New Statesman (December 22, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/richard-dawkins-issue-hitchens

[92] “Jeffrey Epstein Science: Founder” jeffreyepsteinscience.com (January 13, 2015).

[93] 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.

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

[95] Alston Chase. Harvard and the Unabomber The Education of an American Terrorist. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). pp. 18–19.

[96] Khari Johnson. “AI luminary Marvin Minsky allegedly had sex with trafficking victim on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.” Venture Beat (August 9, 2019).

[97] Margaret Sullivan. “Joi Ito should be fired from MIT's Media Lab after taking funding from felon Jeffrey Epstein.” The Washington Post (September 6, 2019).

[98] Evgeny Morozov. “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.” The New Republic (August 22, 2019). Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-intellectual-enabler

[99] James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” New York Times (July 31, 2019).

[100] Emily Flitter & James B. Stewart. “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past.” New York Times (October 12, 2019).

[101] Nancy Dillon. “Jeffrey Epstein reportedly wanted to marry ex-girlfriend’s teen daughter, a scheme the girl knew nothing about, source says.” Daily News (December 18, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-jeffrey-epstein-wanted-to-marry-ex-girlfriend-teen-daughter-report-20191218-x3qqp5melnguznkuorwfiohj5a-story.html

[102] Julie K.Brown & Sarah Blaskey. “Huge cache of records details how Jeffrey Epstein and madam lured girls into depraved world.” Miami Herald (August 9, 2019).

[103] Kate Briquelet & Michael Daly. “NYC Power Couple’s Butler Says Swedish Teen Told Him of Epstein Island Horrors.” The Daily Beast (August 19, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-scandal-butler-for-glenn-and-eva-dubin-says-swedish-teen-told-him-she-was-pressured-for-sex

[104] Carol Loomis & Miguel Helft. “The Total Number of Members, Many Signing Jointly With Their Spouses, Has Reached 81.” Fortune (April 19, 2012). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20120704145745/http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/19/buffett/

[105] Emily Flitter & James B. Stewart. “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past.” New York Times (October 12, 2019).

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Neil Weinberg. “Epstein’s 11th-Hour Executor Says He Won’t Serve for Estate.” Bloomberg (August 19, 2019).

[109] Matthew Reisz. “The perfect brainstorm.” Times Higher Education (March 20, 2008).

[110] James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” New York Times (July 31, 2019).

[111] Laura M. Holson. “At 68, Maye Musk, the Mother of Elon, Is Reclaiming the Spotlight.” New York Times (April 30, 2016)

[112] Drake Baer and Shana Lebowitz. “14 books that inspired Elon Musk.” Business Insider (October 21, 2015).

[113] Ernest Davis. “Ethical Guidelines for A Superintelligence” Journal Artificial Intelligence (Volume 220 Issue C, March 2015).

[114] Gred Kumparak. “Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial Intelligence To ‘Summoning The Demon’” TechCrunch (October 26, 2014).

[115] Ross Andersen. “Elon Musk puts his case for a multi-planet civilisation.” Aeon (September 30, 2014).

[116] Andrew Griffin. “Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.” Independent (October 6, 2016)

[117] Tad Friend. “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny.” The New Yorker (October 10, 2016).

[118] Andrew Griffin. “Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.” Independent (October 6, 2016)

[119] Giulio Prisco. “Venture Capitalist Explains How Quantum Computers Harness Parallel Universes.” Hacked (July 7, 2015).

[120] “Quantum Computing – Artificial Intelligence Is Here,” Idea City (2015).

[121] Ibid.

[122] Ibid.

[123] “Shtetl-Optimized: D-Wave Easter Spectacular” (March 7, 2007). Retrieved from http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=225

[124] Seung Woo Shin, Graeme Smith, John A. Smolin & Umesh Vazirani. “How ‘Quantum’ is the D-Wave Machine?” Computer Science division, UC Berkeley, USA (January 28, 2014).

[125] “D-Wave: comment on comparison with classical computers.” Stuff (June 10, 2013). Retrieved from http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/

[126] Cho Adrian, “Quantum or not, controversial computer yields no speedup.” Science, (20 June 2014), 344 (6190): 1330–1331.

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First