Was Surveillance the Purpose of the Internet?
April 30, 2014
left, the all seeing eye
David Livingstone implies that all-pervasive
surveillance was the intention, and not an
accidental byproduct of the invention of
the personal computer & Internet.
(Editor's Note: David Livingstone is a friend, and a brilliant researcher with an encyclopedic mind. However, we have a longstanding disagreement over style. He amasses facts. For years, I have asked him to make general statements that explain what the facts are intended to prove. Nevertheless, I present this recent article because it is redolent of new and important things, including the Cabalist idea that virtual reality is somehow "creating God.")
by David Livingstone
(Abridged by henrymakow.com)
The personal computer was largely a product of the "computer liberation" movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s.
More specifically, those trends were in turn an outgrowth of the CIA's MK-Ultra program that popularized drug use for "mind-expanding" purposes.
(Stewart Brand, now 75) A leading representative of this trend, who coined the term "personal computer," was Stewart Brand, MK-Ultra agent and founder of the influential Whole Earth Catalogue.
By the mid-1960s, Brand was associated with key MK-Ultra agent, author Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters." In San Francisco, Brand produced the Trips Festival, involving rock music and light shows. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. Brand is described in the beginning of Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Brand was deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller.
Jeffrey Steinberg in From Cybernetics to Littleton: Techniques of Mind Control, reports that, their goal "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 their efforts was the absurd belief that the human mind was a machine, and a Tower of Babel-like conviction that its functioning could be replicated, and eventually surpassed, by computers.
In 1974, Stewart Brand an essay announcing, "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people."
Brand created the Whole Earth Catalogue, 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." According to Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, the catalogue was "one the bibles of my generation."
Also working with Brand was Howard Rheingold, who was as founding executive editor of HotWired, one of the first commercial content web sites published in 1994 by Wired magazine. A lifelong fascination with mind augmentation and its methods led Rheingold to the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Xerox PARC.PARC is a research and development company 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. The evolving mythos is that Steve Jobs was granted access to view PARC's developments, and was able to turn them into marketable products by integrating them into the Macintosh computer.
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. Originally founded as a means of attracting commercial business research at Stanford University in California, SRI began taking on military and intelligence contracts, many of them classified.
In May 1974, SRI led a study on how to transform the US into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, entitled "Changing Images of Man." The report stressed the importance of the United States in promoting Masonic ideals, effectively creating the ideal Masonic state.
Leading the study was Willis Harman,(1918-1997) left, a former consultant to the White House and who had been involved in LSD research on behalf of the CIA.In 1976, Harman wrote An Incomplete Guide to the Future in which he advocated a society based on the ideals of Freemasonry. Harman believed that the symbol of the pyramid with the floating capstone on the Great Seal "indicates that the nation will flourish only as its leaders are guided by supraconscious intuition," which he defined as "divine insight."
Willis Harman disciple Marilyn Ferguson in her best-selling The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), depicted the New Age counterculture as the realization of H. G. Wells' The Open Conspiracy, tried to popularize it by painting the drive to foster New Age doctrines as a spontaneous and positive development.
Ferguson conducted a survey of 185 leaders of the Human Potential and New Age Movement and found that the most influential thinkers mentioned were the French philosopher, Jesuit priest and Julian Huxley associate, Teilhard de Chardin, of the Piltdown Man hoax, followed by Carl Jung who worked closely with CIA head Allen Dulles, and Aldous Huxley, who was the guiding figure of its MK-Ultra program.
Aldous' brother Julian wrote the introduction to de Chardin's book, The Phenomenon of Man. Aldous and Julian were the grandsons of Thomas H. Huxley, who was also a founder of the infamous Round Table, which was responsible for creating the Council on Foreign Relations. Thomas H. Huxley was also known as "Darwin's Bulldog," for his defense of evolutionary theory, which according to Rabbi Kook (1865 - 1935), most important exponent of Religious Zionism, "is increasingly conquering the world at this time, and, more so than all other philosophical theories, conforms to the Kabbalistic secrets of the world." According to Julian Huxley: "evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself."
Interest in Darwinism was related to the Theosophical notion of spiritual evolution. Based on the Kabbalah, it asserted that nature as well as human consciousness evolves, forming the basis of the belief in an expected cultural transformation that would come to characterize much twentieth-century occult and eventually New Age thought.
(Teilhard de Chardin is often regarded as the patron saint of the Internet.) Often referred to as the "Catholic Darwin," 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, culminating in the goal of history, which he referred to as the Omega Point, a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving.
Teilhard called on humanity to create a "sphere of mutually reinforced consciousness, the seat, support and instrument of super-vision and super-ideas."
In other words, mankind was to build the Noosphere. Effectively, man will create God, the all-seeing eye featuring on the back of the dollar bill, floating above the pyramid of human society, whose omniscience and wisdom will be derived from mining the accumulated data from recording every facet of human activity.
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David's original article can be found here.
David Livingstone's latest book is Black Terror, White Soldiers: Islam, Fascism and the New Age
David adds: There was quite a bit of hesitation that the computer and the internet were going to serve Big Brother. So they marketed the computer as a potential anti-establishment tool.Consider Stewart Brand's comment, back in 1972: "That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It's way off the track of the "Computers - Threat or menace?" school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush."
So, interesting that Apple's famous computer commercial features a woman throwing a hammer at a screen featuring Big Brother.
Related-
(Video) The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet
First Comment from ZZ in Poland:
Please give my compliments to Livingstone. His short article is a bomb!
It should [it must] be elaborated on - this topic ABSOLUTELY DESERVES IT. All the facts fit the hidden, scattered puzzle picture and every one of them - a dozen in total - deserves not a statement, but a whole paragraph, if not a full chapter.
I know and you know that Livingstone has the needed facts and penmanship. Now is the time to make use of it, otherwise I will hold you personally liable for promoting socially irresponsible people ;-)
From Anonymous:
The real goal of the so-called Kabbalists or Illuminati is to become God. The most important proof that they have achieved this goal is to provably possess the most important power that theologians have ascribed to God. That is creatio ex nihilo, or creation from nothing. Their goal is to have one world fiat currency, money created from nothing. This gives them the power to create or destroy nations, cities, etc. They also want to be able to make or destroy all species, a divine power. Thus genetic engineering. They wish to have the power to define right or wrong, without being bound by any external code. Thus the promulgation of the doctrine of existentialism.
Lesser beings, of course, will be bound by the rules assigned to them. The most important power is the creation of the world itself. Thus their motto is that perception is everything. They deny that there is a reality beyond perception. Thus by molding the means of perception they create reality itself, insofar as one can speak of such a thing. They then have fiat currency, fiat morals, and fiat reality. They will have proved to their own satisfaction that they are God.
I should add the powers to control the weather and to provide the food we eat. Those have traditionally been viewed as divine powers. Instead of thanking God for the food we eat, we are to thank Monsanto... and hope that Monsanto keeps feeding us. Instead of praying to God for the rain that produces food, we are to pray to the God of the Noosphere, the Illuminati hierarchy.
From Richard:
People used to know or at least suspect the Internet years before it became a reality. When I was in college in the mid 1970's, we anticipated 'Big Brother' would take the form of "2 way Television". Magazines such as Popular Electronics and Psychology Today predicted that when "closed circuit" TV (later called cable TV) would be large flat screens fitted on the wall, that would have a camera so that people on the other end could see you, and you could see them. Of course the "paranoid" suspected "the Government" would abuse such intrusive technology, by making sure end users could not turn it off. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four predicted exactly that, in 1948.
But it wasn't a lack of tech literacy that made skeptics stay off the Internet. We'd thought personal computers were great in the early 1980's, but we used them for word processing, information storage and printing. Even hooking a phone modem to a DOS computer in the days of Telnet, it wasn't possible for someone on the other end to see your files. Still, we knew that the internet had been developed and deployed first by DARPA under the Department of Defense in the 1950's, as a closed system for military communication. Then came ARPA, for government scientists. Next came universities and private sector corporate communications. Banks. The internet was a hand-me-down from the 'military / industrial complex'.
Nearly everyone I knew from 1990-1995 delayed "going online" to see what happened to the people who couldn't wait to get on it. By the end of the 1990's the holdouts let their guard down, because so many friends applied peer pressure, plus employers began to insist on sending resumes in Word Doc or PDF format only. I remember when people stopped answering or sending "groundmail" letters. We were right in the first place. It was a trap.
Chad said (May 5, 2014):
The NSA revelations should have come as no surprise. Big IT is hooked deep with the eugenicist controlled US government and can be called a surveillance arm of the New World Order. Their mission is to collect, track, trace and database any and all information about the subject population. Whether it be through your appliances, light fixtures, Smart TV, telephone, Smart Meter and the like. You are literally giving up your 4th and 5th Amendment rights by voluntarily using their devices and systems.
The data collection and surveillance of the personal computer and the Internet are not an after thought and I’d argue the plan all along. Again, go back over the history of these corporations. They likely literally developed this technology from the get-go as a means to enhance their efforts at population control. Just about all the sciences and fields of study in academia were created and developed for these purposes. Why would IT be any different?
By the way, the “Hewlett and Packard Foundations†(that’s HP folks!!) work with the “Rockefeller Foundation†on population issues. If that helps you understand where these people are coming from.