A “Free Market” Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Techno-Fascist History of Neo-Eugenic Transhumanism

A half century ago, Yale Professor of Physiology José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado Jr. published a composite of his groundbreaking research on neural-implant technology. Compiling roughly two decades of his laboratory experiments on human and animal subjects, Delgado’s Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Societydocumented that 

it is already possible [in 1969] to equip animals or human beings with minute instruments called ‘stimoceivers’ for radio transmission and reception of electrical messages to and from the brain in completely unrestrained subjects. Microminiaturization of the instrument’s electronic components permits control of all parameters of excitation for radio stimulation of three different points within the brain and also telemetric recording of three channels of intracerebral electrical activity.  . . .

It is reasonable to speculate that in the near future the stimoceiver may provide the essential link from man to computer to man, with a reciprocal feedback between neurons and instruments which represents a new orientation for the medical control of neurophysiological functions [1].

Now, fifty years later in 2019, Delgado’s futurist speculations have become a reality as several Big Tech corporations, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, are manufacturing and marketing the next generation of “stimoceivers,” or “brain-computer interfaces,” for commercial consumption. 

The benefits of such “brain chips” range from medical devices that can treat neurological disorders, such as epilepsy and paralysis, to cognitive enhancements which can “upgrade” human brain powerso that it can interface with the artificially intelligent supercomputers which will drive the global economy in the new age of digitally automated workforces. Nonetheless, underneath these utopian-futurist prospects, the current “free-trade” production of brain-machine interfaces is nothing less than the “free-market” proliferation of José Delgado’s eugenicist dream come true: a disturbing vision of a transhumanist evolution that neo-eugenically merges humans and computers into a new cyborg species. 

Buyer beware: if you’re thinking about “plugging in” to human-machine interfaces linked to the “internet of everything,” you might change your mind after considering the techno-fascist history of eugenics and social engineering that has fueled the corporatist development of human-computer interfaces.

Facebook Mind-Reading Technologies:

Facebook’s Building 8 research-and-development facility has been engineering brain-computer interfaces under the former Directorship of Regina Dugan, who previously worked for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) of the US military. On April 19, 2017, Dugan showcased a Facebook-patented brain-machine interface that enables the wearer to type on a computer screen just by thinking. Based on this thought-to-text biotechnology, the Facebook company aims to evolve this prototype so that it can enable “brain clicks” which control virtual-reality and augmented-reality technologies. 

Duganhas promised that the Facebook corporation is “not talking about decoding your random thoughts. That might be more than any of us care to know.” But such a promise is hard to believe given the fact that Facebook is a data-mining corporation that generates profits by siphoning and selling the personal dataof everyone who uses the company’s social-media platform. Indeed, Facebook’s social-media network is even an active participant in the domestic surveillance operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At the same time, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before US Congressregarding his social-media company’s complicity in the Cambridge Analyticaelection-tampering debacle.

Simply put, Facebook has a sordid reputation for circumventing the privacy expectations of its customers. As such, it is reasonable to suspect that Facebook’s human-computer interfaces will track, record, and sell a person’s cognitive-behavioral metadata embedded in the electrochemical algorithms of his or her neurobiological “speech” and “thought” transmissions (just like Facebook’s social-media platform tracks, records, and sells a person’s cognitive-behavioral metadata embedded in his or her psychological profile which is aggregated from his or her social-media posts).

Elon Musk’s Neuro-Technocracy:

Elon Musk’s Neuralink corporation recently gave a press release showcasingthe first prototypes of the company’s “brain chips,” called “neural laces,” which Musk says will link to an “app” that “basically Bluetooths to your phone.” 

Back in September 6, 2018, Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Experiencepodcast where he announced that his Neuralink corporation will be manufacturing microchips which will enable the human brain to interface with artificially intelligent supercomputers. According to Musk, neural-lace computer chips “can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.” 

Musk further pontificated that “[s]ome high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.” For Musk, “artificial general intelligence [AGI],” or sentient AI, will soon become “smarter than the smartest human on earth”; and human beings will become “useless” unless we neo-eugenically upgrade into transhuman-AI creatures. During the interviewwith Joe Rogan, Musk literally said, “if you can’t beat it [AI], join it.”

Musk, who is also the CEO of the Teslaelectric car company, may champion his hi-tech neuro-brain implants as the evolutionary savior of humanity which will rescue the human species from being rendered obsolete by artificially intelligent machines. However, the ubiquitous merger of humankind with corporate machines bears a disconcerting resemblance to the fascistic plans of Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who was the Research Directorof Canada’s Technocracy Inc.: a techno-fascistic non-governmental organization that was outlawed by the Canadian governmentin 1940 due to fears that The Technocrats were plottingto “overthrow the government and the constitution of this country [Canada] by force” [2].Musk’s grandfather, Haldeman, was arrested as a result of his Technocracy membership, though he was later acquitted.

A Skull-and-Bones History of Transhumanist Neural Implants:

These techno-fascist backstories behind the Facebook and Neuralink corporations are enough to cause concern regarding the companies’ trendy new brain-computer interfaces that are currently being marketed. But the disconcerting techno-fascist history of these newly commercialized brain-machine interfaces extends all the way back to the “founding father” of neural-implant technology himself: José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado Jr., whose research at Yale has been guided by the hidden hand of the Nazi-sympathizing secret society known as The Order of Skull and Bones.

In 1946, Delgadowas hired as a research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine’s Physiology Department where he later became a professor from 1950 to 1974. Shortly after the first year of Delgado’s research fellowship, in 1947, the Yale University Councilwas established “as an advisory body to the President of the University for the purpose of studying and making recommendations on particular facets of University life,” including “strategic planning for the sciences, [and] developments at the School of Medicine.” A founding member of the Yale Council was Skull-and-Bonesman Frank Davis Ashburn, who served on the council from 1947 to 1954 while Delgado was conducting his neuroscience experiments at Yale [3]. It is worth noting that Bonesman Frank Davis and his father Percy Moreau Ashburn, who was a US Military Academy Professor of Medical Hygiene, co-authored The Ranks of Death: A Medical History of the Conquest of America, which documents how the spread of disease was instrumental to the colonization of the America’s by European settlers. 

In brief, in 1947, Bonesman Frank Ashburn, who was a scholar of medical history, helped found and operate the Yale Council to oversee “strategic planning for the sciences . . . at the School of Medicine” approximately one year after was Delgado hired at the School of Medicine, in 1946, to pioneer his transhumanist brain-implant surgeries.

As Delgado continued his transhumanist stimoceiver research at Yale from 1954 to 1965, Bonesman Charles Stafford Gage was the Treasurer of Yale University [4]. Hence, Bonesman Gage would have been in charge of the Treasury Department which, according to the Yale website, “is responsible for maintaining the University’s operating bank accounts, for monitoring the University’s daily cash position, for processing all in-coming and out-going domestic and international wire transfers, [and for] the establishment of petty cash funds.” As such, Gage would have overseen the funding of Delgado’s electronic brain-implant experiments at Yale.

In sum, during the years of Bonesman Ashburn at the Yale Council (1947-1954) and Bonesman Gage at the Yale Treasury (1954-1965), Delgado’s cutting-edge research into neo-eugenic neuro-technologies was administratively and financially guided by the hidden hand of The Order of Skull and Bones. 

During his years at Yale, Delgado collaborated with Frank Ervin and Vernon Mark, who wrote the 1970 book, Violence and the Brain. In this book, Delgado’s colleaguesposited a eugenicist theory that the purported riotous tendencies of inner-city African Americans could be “quelled” by implanting urban blacks with brain-chip stimoceivers and other electronic neuro-technologies. It is worth noting here that Delgado’s experiments on electronic “brain stimulation” were sponsoredby the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Aeromedical Research Laboratory of the US military.

As a professor of the Yale School of Medicine, Delgado was assisted by his research partner Hannibal Hamlin, who helped him conduct surgical experiments on mental patients at the State Hospital for Mental Diseases in Howard, Rhode Island, where Delgado and Hamlin implanted electronic devices into the brains of humans in order to study the capabilities of neuro-technological mind control. In Delgado’s Physical Control of the Mind, he writes, 

[i]n the early 1950s, a patient in a state mental hospital approached Dr. Hannibal Hamlin and me requesting help.  . . . The patient expressed a strong desire as well as an ability to alter her conduct, and because psychiatric treatment had failed, she and her mother urgently requested that some kind of brain surgery be performed in order to control her disreputable, impulsive behavior. They asked specifically that electrodes be implanted to orient possible electrocoagulation of a limited cerebral area [5].

Hannibal Hamlin, himself a graduate of Yale Medical School, happens to be the father of Charles B. Hamlin, who was inducted into the Yale Order of Skull and Bones in 1961 [6]. Charles B.would take up the mantle of his father Hannibal as Charles became a practicing orthopedic surgeon who opened several “hand clinics” that specialize in hand surgeries, including “nerve . . . repair or reconstruction” surgeries. Carrying the neo-eugenic torch for José Delgado and Hannibal Hamlin, Bonesman Charles B. performed numerous prosthetic-implant surgeries to help patients restore “significant functional loss” of their hands. 

Now retired, Charles B. continues to promote other transhumanist medical advancements, such as neuro-engineering through stem cell therapy and gene editing: 

[w]e are in an enlarging frontier of vascular and nerve surgery. With the unraveling of the genome, we may well see the manipulation or regenerative growth of damaged cartilage. This will affect not only the diseases we get but our response to them.  . . . We might eventually be able to program the environment and orchestrate its response to such problems. I am also excited about the acceptance and advancement of stem cell research to help tissue regenerate. The recently launched Geron project in this country [USA] is beginning trials using embryonic stem cells in the freshly injured spinal cord. This could give us great insight into how we can help the central nervous system heal.

It is worth noting that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) filed a 2008 reportwhich documents that Charles B. committed “serious violations of Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (21 CFR) Part 812 – Investigational Device Exemptions, Part 50 – Protection of Human Subjects, and Section 520(g) (21 U.S.C. 360j(g)) of the Act.” In particular, Charles Hamlin failed to comply with FDA regulations pertaining to ethical standards for performing medical operations involving “a device as that term is defined in section 201(h) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act), 21 U.S.C. 32(h).” 

According to section 201(h), such a device is a defined as 

an instrument, apparatus, implement, machine, contrivance, implant, in vitro reagent, or other similar or related article, including any component, part, or accessory which is— . . .

• [i]ntended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of its primary intended purposes. The term “device” does not include software functions excluded pursuant to section 520(o).

In particular, the FDA reportdocuments that Hamlin’s experiments with a 201(h) device committed the following “failures”:

• “[F]ailure to await FDA approval before allowing subjects to participate in the investigation.”
• “Failure to ensure that informed consent is obtained . . . and failure to properly document informed consent.”
• “Failure to conduct the investigation in accordance with the investigational plan.”
• “Failure to prepare and submit complete, accurate and timely reports of unanticipated adverse effects.”

It should also be noted that The Order of Skull and Bones surrounds neurosurgeon, Eric Leuthardt: another transhumanist pioneer who performs brain surgeries which implant computer chips into human brains for the purposes of treating cerebral-nervous disabilities. At Washington University of St. Louis, Missouri, where Leuthardt conducts his transhumanist brain-chip surgeries, Bonesman Regis James O’Keefe is the Chair of Orthopedic Surgery [7]. Additionally, alongside faculty members Leuthardt and Bonesman O’Keefe, there is Bonesman Bryan Fitch Myers, who is the Patrick and Joy Williamson Endowed Chair in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine [8].

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review, the Bones-acquainted “Leuthardt believes that in the next several decades such [brain] implants will be like plastic surgery or tattoos, undertaken with hardly a second thought.” In fact, Leuthardteven wrote a transhumanist science fiction novel, “a techno-thriller called Red Devil 4, [in which] 90 percent of human beings have elected to get computer hardware implanted directly into their brains.”

A Eugenics by Any Other Name:

The concept of transhumanism was coined by Julian Huxley, who was the brother of Aldous Huxley: the author of the dystopic Brave New World. In Julian’s 1957 New Bottles for New Wine, he wrote a chapter titled “Transhumanism,” which proclaims “‘I believe in transhumanism’ . . . a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking [prehistoric] man” [9].For Julian Huxley, who was a President of the British Eugenics Society, transhumanism is the culmination of a “scientific eugenics,” project that requires a new form of “evolution” in which natural biological selection is replaced with an artificial technological selection that merges humans and machines into a new cyborg species. 

As the first Director General of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Huxley authored UNESCO’s 1948 mission statement, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, which calls for a global eugenics program: “[i]t is, however, essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the borders of science, for, as already indicated, in the not very remote future the problem of improving the average quality of human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be accomplished by applying the findings of a truly scientific eugenics” [10]. Moreover, this founding UNESCO document asserts that techno-eugenic “[e]volution in the human sector consists mainly of changes in the form of society, in tools and machines . . . [I]t is in social organisation, in machines, and in ideas that human evolution is mostly made manifest” [11]. 

It should be noted that as Director General of UNESCO, Huxley collaborated with the first US delegate to sit on the governing boardof UNESCO,Bonesman Archibald MacLeish, who authored the Preamble to the UNESCO Constitution [12]. Other ties between globalist eugenics and The Order of Skull and Bones are linked through Bonesman Percy Rockefeller’s uncle[13], John D. Rockefeller, who used his tax-exempt Rockefeller Foundation to pour money into Nazi eugenics projects at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry; and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research [14]. The Rockefeller Foundationalso paid large sums to American eugenics institutions such as Charles Davenport’s Cold Spring Harbor Station for Experimental Evolution, which was established with the help of another Robber Baron philanthropy: the Carnegie Institute where Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman was its first President[15].

Davenport’s Cold Spring Harbor eugenics laboratory was eventually fused with the Eugenics Record Office, which was erected with substantial donations of money and land from railroad magnate E. H. Harriman’swife, Mary Williamson Harriman(née Averell), who was the mother of Bonesmen W. Averell Harriman and E. Roland Harriman[16]. E. Roland would later aid in financing the Nazi-eugenic takeover of Germany through his influence at Union Banking Corporation (UBC), which funneled capital to Hitler through one of the Führer’s major financial backers: the German industrialist owner of UBC, Fritz Thyssen, whose fellow-Nazi banking partners, H. J. Kouwenhoven and J. L. Guinter, sat on the UBC Board of Directors along with E. Roland and his fellow Bonesmen, Knight Woolley and Prescott Bush, the latter of whom was the father of Bonesman George H. W. Bush and the grandfather of Bonesman George W. Bush [17]. According to a 1989 Louisville Courier-Journal article, there is a room in the Temple of The Order on the Yale campus wherein the Bones “Tomb” houses “a little Nazi shrine inside, [and] one room on the second floor has a bunch of swastikas, kind of an SS macho iconography” [18]. 

On Second Thought?

From The Order of Skull and Bones to DARPA to Technocracy Inc., the history behind transhumanist brain-computer interfaces is a dark legacy of militarized, techno-fascist eugenics. Today, Facebook’s and Neuralink’s human-computer interfaces are being advertised as hi-tech commodities that are manufactured for the “greater good” of enhancing cognition and administering medical assistance for people with epilepsy, paralysis, and other neurological disabilities. 

To be sure, the future of neural-implant computer-tech may promise a utopian new age of scientific miracles that merge humans and machines into an internet-of-everything “Singularity.” But where the digital rubber meets the silicon road to an artificially intelligent cyborg future, the sordid past of technocratically weaponized eugenics may catch up to the current fork in the road where humankind decides whether to take a “great leap forward” and “evolve” into a new species that “upgrades” its biology with computerized electronics.

Buyer beware: consuming transhumanist technological products that are labeled as “utopian” may result in dystopian side-effects.

References:

[1]  José M. R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society(New York: Harper Colophon, 1969), 90-91.

[2]  Joseph C. Keating Jr. and Scott Haldeman, “Joshua N Haldeman, DC: the Canadian Years, 1926-1950,” Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association39 no. 3 (1995): 172-186.

[3]  Kris Millegan, Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003), 637.

[4]  Ibid.

[5]  José M. R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society(New York: Harper Colophon, 1969), 217.

[6]  Kris Millegan, Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003), 658.

[7]  Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 299.

[8]  Ibid.

[9]  Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine(London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 17.

[10]  Ibid, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy(Washington D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1948), 42.

[11]  Ibid,9-10.

[12]  Archibald MacLeish and Henri Bonnet, “Unesco,” 

Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 27.

Krishna R. Dronamraju, If I Am to Be Remembered: The Life and Works of Julian Huxley with Selected Correspondence(River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 1993), 68.

[13]  Antony C. Sutton,America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 290.

[14]  Edwin Black,War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 283.

[15]  Antony C. Sutton,America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 285.

David Madsen, “Daniel Coit Gilman at the Carnegie Institution of Washington,” History of Education Quarterly9 no. 2 (1969): 154-186.

Edwin Black,War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 36, 41.

[16]  Antony C. Sutton,America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 291, 292.

Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 54-55.

James D. Watson, “Genes and Politics,” Davenport’s Dreams: 21^stCentury Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics, eds. Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008), 1.

[17]  Antony C. Sutton,America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, Updated Reprint, (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2002), 126, 165-170.

Ibid,Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: The Astonishing True Story of the American Financiers Who Bankrolled the Nazis(California: Clairview, 1976), 103, 107, 25-26, 57, 99, 102, 103, 106, 112-114, 141.

[18]  Steven M. L. Aronson, “The Bonesmen’s Bond: President’s, Poets, Pundits and Pinkos Have Sworn Allegiance to Skull and Bones, Yale’s Rich and Powerful Secret Society, and the Most Exclusive College Club of All. So What’s All That Nazi Stuff Doing in the Clubhouse?,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 8, 1989, quoted in Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society, ed. Kris Millegan (OR: Trine Day, 2003), 140.