THE INTERNET IS A PSYOP - YouTube
Transcripts:
One of the weirdest things that's happened to me as a content creator was the time someone stalked me. This wasn't super serious. I highly doubt I was ever in any danger or anything, but they found out a bunch of personal information about me and harassed me with it online. The thing that was funny though is that their reason for doing it was because they became convinced that I was working for the CIA and would say things like, "How else could he make such high quality videos every single month if he isn't a fed?" Sorry to
disappoint, but the real answer is just a ton of vians. High-grade stuff, too. Shipped directly from Langley. Cut this out. Cut this out. But this isn't at all an uncommon accusation in online politics, especially when you start digging into the weirder stuff. Everyone who's anyone is constantly being accused of working for an intelligence agency while also accusing everyone else of the exact same thing.
And that's kind of the entire internet now, right? Existing online now involves this constant state of paranoia where we all know that everything and everyone is constantly trying to manipulate us from all sides. Right-wing media figure, Russian scio, leftist podcaster, co-intel pro, centerleft YouTuber, Zionist shill, mainstream media buddy, you can see them glowing from space.
And sometimes the likelihood that you're witnessing an actual military psychological warfare campaign goes up. One of the craziest examples of this that I've seen is Haley Luon. She's an egirl influencer in the army. And at first glance, her content seems like some pretty standard hello fellow kids thirst trapping to boost recruitment.
And in a lot of ways, that's completely accurate. Forgot to take my ADHD and accidentally join the Coast Guard. Look at [Music] But the thing that's unique about Haley is that she's very open about the fact that her job is conducting SCOPs. Ladies, I'm trying to do my work today.
The app itself was a psychological operation from the get- go, but unfortunately the department has run out of funding. This could be easily avoidable by paying more taxes, upping the defense budget, and getting more enlistes in the army. You guys don't want to cooperate. So now we can't have anything, can we? Additionally, www.goarmmy.
com, I hear, is the next up and cominging social media platform if you guys want to check that out. To me, there's something so sinister about the fact that when you look through the kinds of memes she posts, they're more or less the same kind of thing that you'd see from any hyperonline irony poisoned egirl.
And yet, they definitely take on a very different meaning coming from her. It's kind of hard to describe, but this feels almost like acknowledgment of the fact that things are so cooked that there's no need to hide this stuff. In fact, it's often more effective if it's out in the open. Now, it's very easy to think that this is some new thing, and in some ways, it is.
Things are getting increasingly locked down and sensorious as all privacy is increasingly being stripped away. Even just over the course of making this video, the UK rolled out their online safety act or OSA. While its stated purpose is to prevent kids from accessing porn or content that relates to drugs, eating disorders, or bullying, in practice, that is basically the entire internet. And so what this actually entails is requiring people to submit their government IDs for every major platform, something that all of these sites are more than happy to have on file. Oh, we need to start asking everyone for their government ID. Us,
the companies that have already shown that we can't be trusted with that and have already harvested way too much of our users data. Well, anything for the kids. In response to the massive backlash, offcom has doubled down by saying that they want to go after any platforms that encourage people to use VPNs to get around age checks.
So anyway, this video is sponsored by Surf Shark. Folks, you ever find yourself looking to watch a region lock movie on your streaming platform of choice or feeling like looking something up on Wikipedia without showing your driver's license? Well, all that and more is possible thanks to Surf SharkVPN.
Surf Shark has servers in over 100 countries, which is great news since similar laws to the ones passed in England are currently working their way through the courts in America, Canada, France, and Australia, likely with many more to follow. One subscription to Surf Shark lets you use it on an unlimited number of devices at the same time.
and it runs on everything. Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, smart TVs, game consoles, and even Fire Sticks. Now, just to be real here, I try to avoid taking sponsorships that are too closely related to the topics of my videos. Not because that could influence what I say. My sponsors never have any control or really even knowledge of what my videos are going to be about.
But regardless, I don't want to look like a shill. you know, this one is kind of treading the line a bit. So, I'll just say that I'm not going to sit here and tell you that just using a VPN will prevent the government or anyone who really wants to from spying on you. Very much the opposite, in fact. Nor am I going to say that everyone getting Surf Shark would be anything more than at best a temporary band-aid for all these laws coming out.
That said, I think that this is potentially a useful, if limited, tool that everyone should maybe consider taking advantage of. So, yeah, if Japanese Netflix or scrolling Twitter without giving Elon Musk access to your biometrics appeals to you, click the link in the description or go to surf shark.com/inhell and use codeinhell at checkout to get four extra months for free.
But while I think that these new threats to our speech, privacy, and sanity are extremely important, they also aren't anything new. In fact, that's kind of been the entire point of the internet from its very inception. And that's what I'm going to show you in this video.
But before we get into it, let me just do a bit of housekeeping and explain what this video is. So, my last video was about AI weapons and sort of just the history of computing and how that's deeply tied to the US military. While I was editing that, I found out about this book, Surveillance Valley by Yasha Lavine, which covers exactly that in amazing detail along with some wild investigative reporting.
But by the time I found it, I was way too late to go back and add another hour or two to the video. And so I decide to make everything that I would have added into its own video instead. This one. I'm bringing all this up to say that a while you don't need to watch my last video to understand what I'm talking about here.
If you like this one, but just wish that it was 2 hours longer, then I've got some great news for you. But also, I usually try to pull from a pretty broad array of sources. But the vast majority of this video is going to be based off of this one source. I'd recommend checking out the book because it's amazing, but also so the H.
Bomber guy doesn't burst out of this wall behind me. Now, let's get into it. Like any good story, this one begins with our old friends over at the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik and was originally tasked with closing the technology gap between America and the Soviets by funding and managing cuttingedge research in space travel and computing as well as missile defense and detection.
However, there was a change in plans when NASA was founded 5 months after ARPA and took over the civilian space program, robbing ARPA of their coolest job. Not to worry though, as the Cold War began to simmer in the 60s, America was putting their all into stomping out communist uprisings around the world and learned the valuable lesson that asymmetrical warfare is a [ __ ] Turns out that while mass bombing campaigns and search and destroy missions work great when you're up against a country, they're significantly less useful against gorilla insurgents hiding out in the woods. And this is where ARPA found
their niche, developing methods for this new kind of warfare, counterinsurgency. Now, the thing about counterinsurgency is that you need to understand the target and use that info to develop a unique strategy. As it was described in a US military seminar, quote, "The same bullet will kill with just about the same effectiveness whether used against a target in the United States, Africa, or Asia. However, the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency weapon is dependent upon the specific target.
So, first of all, what do you mean by just about? Is there a continent where bullets hurt less? But also, as you might guess, if you're developing this kind of unique strategy to win hearts and minds while bombing villages, you're going to need a deep, nuanced understanding of the people you're fighting's culture, heritage, geography, and material conditions.
Instead, ARPA's deputy director, William Gadell, launched Project Agile, meant to develop counterinsurgency methods in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Thailand, and Lao. Agile combined cuttingedge computer surveillance with the latest in social science research to study the people of these regions.
One example of this was Operation Igloo White, which involved dropping listening devices and urine sensors all along the Ho Chi Min Trail. This was a massive undertaking that involved not just the latest advancements in piss detection technology, but also a fleet of orbiting planes to pick up signals from the sensors and then send any information to a nearby surveillance center that would still look sci-fi by today's standards.
Not only was this operation expensive and timeconuming, it was also useless. Basically, once the Vietnamese figured out what they were doing, they adapted by playing recordings of truck sounds or throwing bags of urine onto the trail to trip the sensors and then just walked through after the bombs had dropped. But agile wasn't just limited to the battlefield.
And before long, almost all of Vietnam and Thailand were under ARPA's magnifying glass, which wasn't a particularly pleasant place to be. The question Agile wanted to answer was why the indigenous population was fighting them. Like, capitalism is objectively better than communism. So, why didn't everyone just immediately defect? It doesn't make any sense.
In order to solve this impossible riddle, they hired the Rand Corporation to carry out a series of what were referred to as social experiments. But like in the same way that Mr. beast locking a guy in solitary confinement for a month can be called a social experiment. Some examples of this include subjecting defectors and prisoners to 24-hour interrogation sessions, the strategic hamlet initiative, in which they kidnapped a bunch of Vietnamese villagers and kept them in a walledoff area in order to protect them from communist infiltration. or a study done
in Thailand by the American Institute for Research or AIRIR that involved testing out the effectiveness of the pacification techniques that agile had developed on Thai rebel hill tribes. These involved such innovations as assassinating tribal leaders, forcibly relocating villages, and inducing famines. I just don't understand why these people aren't joining our side.
We've tried killing them, kidnapping them, starving them, torturing them, and burning them, and they still think we're the enemy. Maybe this new Agent Orange stuff will do the trick. Also, interestingly, one of the people working for AIR in Thailand at this time was none other than Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve.
I can remember reading the Reader Digest when maybe I was 12 or 13 years old and seeing an article about the Rand Corporation and I swear I read that and I said that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I'd never heard of a place like that. I was over in Thailand. This was 1965-67. And I ended up getting uh work in uh a study of northeastern villages and it was part of the hearts and minds kind of effort that the US military was having at that time.
And you've written I think about your experience in Thailand and the insights the nonquant non-quantitative insights you got from that which I think changed your point of view on things. No essentially um most of what you read in my books I learned in D villages. Yeah, I could definitely see the influence.
But as the war dragged on, the military increasingly came to see agile as nothing more than an expensive boondoggle, which despite its fancy promises of cuttingedge objectivity, wasn't really delivering any serious results. Even Agile's founder and the deputy director of ARPA, William Gadell, turned out to have been embezzling money from the budget for which he wound up being jailed for 5 years. That said, it wasn't a total loss.
An AIRIR report from 1967 called Counterinsurgency in Thailand: The Impact of Economic, Social, and Political Action Programs explains that the methods developed for pacifying resistance in Thailand could be put to good use on anti-war and civil rights activists in America.
The potential applicability of the findings in the United States, will also receive special attention in many of our key domestic programs, especially those directed at disadvantaged subcultures. The methodological problems are similar to those described in the proposal. The application of the Thai findings at home constitutes a potentially most significant project contribution.
or as Charles Murray put it, all of those things when I came back to look at social programs in the United States kept me reminding me that gee, this um inner city Detroit attempt to help delinquents is running into the same problems that they ran into when they tried to introduce double cropping in a time village.
But speaking of expensive boondoggles, let's roll back the clock a bit to talk about one of the first pre-in internets, Sage. On August 29th, 1949, at the semipalitins test site in the Kazak Soviet Republic, a team of Russian scientists successfully cracked an atom, and the resulting explosion served as the starting gun for the Cold War's nuclear arms race.
The US, of course, responded by ramping up their production to make sure that they could cause a longer nuclear winter than the Soviets, but also they got to work overhauling their missile defense systems, which until that point had been essentially analog, and replaced them with the first ever largecale worked computer. The semi-aututonomous ground environment or SAGE took 10 years to make, cost more than the Manhattan project, and was obsolete before it was ever turned on.
In 1957, 3 years before Sage would be finished, the Soviets launched Sputnik, which proved that they had the rocketry technology necessary to land a nuke anywhere in America, something that having high techch network radar could do nothing to prevent. Sage wasn't a total waste of time though since by building it the US developed the capabilities to do computing in a new way that would create the modern computing industry the internet and the man who would make those things happen Joseph Carl Robinet Licklider or as his
friends called him lick lick graduated from Washington University with a triple major in psychology mathematics and physics in 1937 and then started studying how animals process sounds, which it turns out mostly involved cutting open cat skulls and zapping their brains with electricity.
During World War II, he got recruited to work at Harvard's Psycho Acoustic Laboratory, which played a surprisingly important role in the war by developing better microphones and headsets so that pilots could actually hear each other. After the war, he became an associate professor at MIT where he helped to establish and then consult at the Lincoln Lab where he worked on building Sage's GUI.
Lick's involvement in the research changed him, replaced his passion for feline electroshock therapy with a burning obsession with the idea of combining humans and computers through a massive interconnected network. In 1960, he published a paper called Man Computer Symbiosis, describing his vision of a human machine combination, which was a shockingly accurate description of just modern-day computers.
While it seems obvious and kind of trivial to read today, back in 1960, this was visionary. What made this particularly unique was that while there had been plenty of applications of computers for scientific or military purposes, Lick was suggesting integrating them into regular people's everyday lives. In ' 62, Lick joined ARPA and was appointed head of the command and control research division where he allocated funds to the scientists and engineers who would go on to invent computers as we know them today. For example, he funded Douglas C.
Engelbard's augmented research center, which would go on to develop hypertext links video conferencing and the computer mouse. He also put 1.5 billion towards a joint research project at UCLA and UC Berkeley that developed an early way of networking computers together.
But Lick had his eyes set on a much bigger prize. He imagined connecting all these newly emerging computer projects that he was funding into one giant system that he called the great intergalactic network. But while he managed to lay a lot of the groundwork, Lick never actually realized this dream. Instead, after 2 years at ARPA, he decided that he'd done all he could and left the hardware to his successor, a fellow alumni of the Lincoln Lab named Lawrence Roberts. For his part, Wick kicked his feet up for a few years with a cushy consulting job at IBM and then
returned to MIT where he directed Project Mac, a research project that built the first functional computer using the time sharing system thanks to a lot of funding from, you guessed it, ARPA. Now, when you look into the history of the internet, Lick Lighter's name is generally accompanied by glowing praise.
He was by all accounts a brilliant visionary with a gift for spreading his passion for the great intergalactic network to almost anyone he talked to. For that reason, those two years Licklider spent at ARPA are probably the ones the agency would most like the general public to know them for. Unsurprisingly, Lick himself also tried to distance himself from the counterinsurgency being carried out in Southeast Asia.
In an interview in 1988, he had the following conversation. ARPA was 5 years old at the time you arrived. What sort of situation did you find there? How was it set up? What sort of people were active? That's hard to answer. I do not remember extremely well what the organization was. There was one part that distressed me. ARPA had gotten in.
Were we in the Vietnam War then? Not quite yet. We were there, but it had not expanded. There was kind of a cloak and dagger part of it. There was there was a fellow named Bill Goodell who it seemed to me was always trying to get control over what I was doing. I could never tell what he was doing. So that part made me nervous.
Other parts of it, I'm not sure whether it was organized with the strategic office or the tactical office, but it was something along that line. A lot of it was re-entry physics. I had the feeling that there were some real geniuses in this, but there were also some guys who were essentially bureaucrats and managers. So, I sort of stayed out of that as best I could.
I couldn't be totally uninvolved. I had one project that I wasn't queer deeply enough to know what it was. And that made me nervous. The thing is that's not really true. That's not the truth, Ellie. For one thing, around that time, Lick literally was computing at ARPA.
And so anything agile did that involved a computer, which was pretty much all of it, had his fingerprints on it. But it gets a lot more overt than that. In March of ' 62, the army held its limited war and social science research symposium, which was essentially them hard launching counterinsurgency as a primary strategy during the cold war.
Lick Lighter attended on behalf of ARPA and led a working group to develop programs and projects focused on persuasion and motivation. And then there's the Cambridge Project. So I talked about this in my last video, but part of ARPA's work blending computers with social science for counterinsurgency was project Camelot, which involved trying to develop machines that could predict and prevent the rise of left-wing social movements.
Camelot was uncovered and shut down amidst public accusations that ARPA was making a coup machine. Three years later, they rolled out the Cambridge project, a joint project between Harvard, MIT, and ARPA that involve making a massive data library that could be accessed using Project Mack in order to continue the kind of work they've been doing at Project Camelot.
On December 26th, 1969, students at Harvard and MIT held massive protests against the Cambridge Project in which they trashed ARPA Labs and marched into the dean's office and refused to leave. The protests were triggered by members of the students for a democratic society getting their hands on a copy of the project proposal written by none other than Lick along with three of his buddies.
the director of ARPA's information processing techniques office, Robert Taylor, JFK's science advisor and soon to be president of MIT, Jerome Weisner, and an absolute psychopath named Ethael Dissol Pool. Pool was an American academic who studied communications, politics, propaganda, and scops. His early work had to do with using polling data to statistically test the best messages for politicians.
He was an early adopter of incorporating cuttingedge math and technology into telling people whatever they wanted to hear. A strategy that turned out to be extremely effective while he worked on the JFK campaign. But he also had a side hustle. A devout cold warrior, Pool's company, the Simu Maddox Corporation, was one of the ones hired to carry out those deranged studies in Vietnam. This wasn't particularly good for their image.
Simu Maddox was soon accused of making false promises about the effectiveness of their work as well as quite a few war crimes. All of this would ultimately cause Sime Maddox to go bankrupt in 1970. But as it was circling the drain, P was looking for a new way to get defense contracts, which he soon found in the Cambridge project. Now, the way that all this was justified was that the Cambridge project was dual use, meant to be open to any researchers looking to use it to analyze massive data sets, which was a genuinely massive advancement for both the hard and soft sciences. That said, Lick Lighter's proposal to ARPA include the kinds of
data sets the Cambridge project would be using, which make it pretty clear what kind of work government agencies would be using it for. These included public opinion polls for all countries, political participation of various countries, international youth movements, files on contemporary world communist movements, mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change, the merging or splintering of present political movements, international propaganda output, peasant attitudes and behaviors. I think you get the idea. Looking back
from 2025, I think this might be one of history's most confirmed correct anti-technology moral panics. During the MIT protests, Wick actually came out of his office to meet with the SDS protesters while they were trying and failing to burn a copy of his ARPA proposal.
According to an onlooker, quote, "At one point, in fact, they had a copy of the proposal and tried to set fire to it. Not very successfully. Well, after a few minutes, Lick said, "Look, if you want to burn a stack of paper, don't just try to light it. Spread the pages out first." So, we showed them how. And it really did burn much better. Say what you will about Lick.
I mean, this guy may be working with the feds to spy on citizens and commit atrocities, but you got to admit that he knows how to set a fire. Also, this was all covered in a biography of Lick Lighter called The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Wallrop. And the way that he covers it is so [ __ ] In the fall of 1969, he found himself embroiled in a controversy over the Cambridge Project, a separate ARPA funded effort that he had helped to organize in collaboration with Bob Taylor, Jerry Weisner, and a number of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists from MIT and Harvard. Wick and his colleagues had reasoned the Cambridge project would
presumably build up a large and vocal new constituency for interactive computing. At the same time, they hoped such a manifestly benign use of the Pentagon's money would be reassuring and would help to reestablish a dialogue with a segment of academia that had become particularly hostile towards all things military.
Well, it was a nice try. Harvard withdrew almost immediately after bitter faculty meetings denounced the notion of having any contact with the Pentagon whatsoever. Rumor had it that the Cambridge Project was a front for the CIA, that its true intent was to develop software that would keep track of people's liberation movements around the world, that giant computers to run that software were already waiting in the basement of the Pentagon and so on.
To lick, this was the worst part of what Vietnam was doing to the country. A younger generation was being driven into cynicism, paranoia, and a kind of furious despair. It's very funny that the author doesn't see it as a massive indictment.
That Lick Lighter thought that the worst thing about the Vietnam War was that young people just don't trust the CIA anymore. Now, back to Lickers's great intergalactic network. After Lick left ARPA, the project of creating this network of networks continued under Roberts, who was tasked with finding a way to connect the various computer labs Lick had seated across America, all of which were completely incompatible with each other.
Their big breakthrough came when they decided that rather than connecting the computers directly, they could use a system of smaller separate ones as intermediaries. Roberts called them interface messaging processors or IMPPS which were essentially the first ever internet routers.
The IMPs were hooked up to phone lines and would send and receive data and check for errors. If a line went down, then they would redirect the signal through another route. The key thing with the IMPS was that they worked completely independently of the computers connected to them. So, the computers connected to the network didn't need to be compatible with each other.
They just had to work with the IMPPS. And voila, we now had ARPANET, a network linking a series of military installations and schools with defense contracts into what would become the internet as we know it today. Now, something that tends to be missed from most histories of the internet is that back when ARPANET came out, this was not being celebrated. Very much the opposite.
In fact, the way the general public first became aware of ARPANET was through a report on NBC. But unlike modern-day tech reporting, which is mostly just commercials or litigating Twitter beefs, here they had actually done critical investigative reporting. In his expose, Ford Rowan told viewers that the military had built a network that linked computers together, allowing them to share and analyze data, which was being used to spy on Americans.
It's crazy how back then the big conspiracy was just that government agencies kept their information in a database, whereas now everyone's just like, "Yeah, obviously multiple governments and corporations are at all times monitoring everything I do." To be fair though, not only were both computers and mass government surveillance relatively new at the time, at least in public consciousness, but also both were now being tied up with one of the most insane spy programs that there ever was.
So, in 1970, a guy named Christopher Pile, who'd worked as an instructor at a US Army intelligence school in Fort Holler went public about some pretty weird [ __ ] he'd seen related to a counterinsurgency program called Konis Intel. Part of what made this one special is that it was being carried out on Americans. According to Pile, Konis Intel was originally set up in ' 65 to keep tabs on activists so it could give early warning for civil unrest that would require the army to be called in.
But it soon grew and by 1970 was maintaining detailed files on the members, ideologies, programs, and practices of almost every activist group in America. This was all the brainchild of a guy named William P. Yarborough, who thought that all left-wing movements in America were secret insurgency campaigns carried out by the Soviets. He began sending thousands of agents to infiltrate and surveil just about every organization or activist group in America.
This included labor strikes as well as just anyone that they heard was supportive of unions. They tapped the phone of Eugene McCarthy, a sitting US senator who opposed the Vietnam War. bugged the 1968 DNC, infiltrated a group of Catholic priests because they were protesting the church's stance on contraception, and in one case spied on a church-run ski club for troubled teens called Young Adults Program, which the agents were worried about because they thought that there was a connection somehow to hippies.
Why would a troubled teen need to ski anyway unless they're skiing towards a global communist takeover? Also, and this is completely insane, on top of having their agents infiltrate and spy on all of these groups, they also had some of them pose as journalists. Not to surveil the press, although they definitely did that, too, but to film and produce actual coverage of events, which they would then send to generals who apparently liked watching these fake news reports to get information, even though they could have gotten the exact same information from actual news channels. You guys ever think that maybe
the military might be a little bit overfunded? But what made Konis Intel really stand out from all the other ops and the long list of times the US government has spied on left-wing activists was that this was the first time they'd ever used computers to do this.
While the FBI and some state authorities had computers to put all their files into that made them sharable and searchable, this was the first time that kind of tech had been used to document completely legal political activism. When the American people found out that spies had been keeping tabs on every protest, student union, and church bake sale in the country, and then putting everything they saw into a giant computer, they weren't happy.
In 1975, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted an investigation into military surveillance technology where they questioned the assistant secretary of defense, David Cook. In his testimony, Cook insisted that the Arpanet had never been used to transmit surveillance files and then went even further by claiming that it was completely unclassified and only used by academics and that no intelligence agencies even had access to it. However, these were all uh lies.
In testimony given three years earlier by the head of ARPA, now DARPA at this point, Steven Lucasic, he explicitly said that quote, "Our obligation is to design, build, test, and evaluate a high-performance, lowcost, reliable computer network to meet the growing DoD requirements for computer tocomput communications.
" or on the point of arponet being unclassified. Again, Lucas contradicted this in 77 when DARPA was developing endtoend encryption, arguing that it offered the advantage of allowing the military to send classified messages while letting the infrastructure remain open to anyone. But also, none of that even mattered since a few weeks after Cook's testimony, Arpanet was absorbed into the Defensive Communications Agency, making it military.
This is all to say that at this point, computers and this new network connecting them weren't popular. In order to turn things around, someone needed to come in and change their image. Enter Steuart Bran. Bran was born in Rockford, Illinois, went to a fancy boarding school, and then Stanford in 54. While in university, he kept a diary where he wrote a lot about his fears of communism in a way that feels distinctly 18 years old.
Bran saw communists as unthinking automatons whose wills had been brainwashed out of them. Quote, "That my mind would no longer be my own, but a tool carefully shaped by the descendants of Pavlov. That I would lose my identity. That I would lose my will. These last are the worst. If there's a fight, then I will fight and fight with a purpose.
I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty. If I must be a fool, I want to be my own particular brand of fool, utterly unlike other fools. I will fight to avoid becoming a number to others and to myself.
So don't worry, our friend never became a brainwashed unthinking automaton with no identity or will of his own. At least not in a communist way. After graduating in 1960, Bran joined the army, then moved to San Francisco, where he wound up doing a lot of acid as an unknowing test subject for MK Ultra. A lot of really interesting people were involved in that.
Eh, wonder what that's about. Honestly, my take on MK Ultra is that uh I've never seen any real solid evidence that the CIA was successful in developing actual effective mind control techniques. But if they had, that would genuinely explain a lot of coincidences. Anyways, as I'm sure you can tell from that excerpt from his diary, Bran's true calling was writing.
Like all good members of the new left, Bran was extremely inspired by the hippie commune movement and first made a name for himself in ' 68 when he started the whole earth catalog, a magazine featuring tools and supplies needed for homesteading. While this of course include reviews of like tools, camping equipment and gardening advice for Brand it was just as if not more important to provide ideological tools which meant books on philosophy, ecology and cybernetics by people like Buckminister Fuller, Norbert Weiner and Ein Rand. But then things changed for Brand in October
1972 when Rolling Stone sent him to Stanford's artificial intelligence research lab. The guys he met there weren't popular on campus. Part of this was cuz they were a bunch of nerds who didn't know how to party like the cool fraternities, but also mostly it was cuz the lab and all the work that they did there was funded by DARPA, making it a regular target of protests and violent demonstrations.
Brands spend a night hanging out with the DARPA programmers, partying and playing these new things that they called video games. In his article, he assures the reader that these guys aren't corporate suits or evil feds trying to spy on people, but instead based hippies who smoke weed and listen to rock music who are also trying to spy on people.
From this point on, the focus of Bran's work changed. He began arguing that the computer was a tool for freeing your mind, just like LSD. The whole earth catalog began focusing more on cybernetics and technology until eventually spinning off into the whole earth software catalog and later the whole earth electronic link or well one of the first message boards on the early internet.
The worlds of 60s counterculture, early hackers and DARPA glowies began to mix together with brand serving as the bridge. Fast forward a decade or two and Bran would use these connections to pivot into a lucrative career as a spokesperson for the computer industry, using his hippie cred to help tech companies position themselves as being in line with the ' 60s asset heads.
But enough of that ancient history for now. Let's jump forward a few decades to get into some of the modern forces that took over things. Google started out as Larry Page in Sergey Brin's PhD thesis titled the anatomy of large-scale search engines. Paige's thesis advisor was working for the digital library initiative which was of course a DARPA project.
And so even from the very start the first page of the paper that would become Google had the disclosure funded by DARPA. Now I don't want to get too weird and paranoid here. As should be very clear by now, just about every part of big tech is tied in some way back to the military.
And so bringing that up is about as much of a gotcha as saying that a charity was started by a rich capitalist doesn't make it a scop. But it does mean that you should be suspicious and guarded around it and everything else at all times. No, but in my books, it's not enough to just show that there's a connection, but also that something weird was going on as a result of it. Anyway, before settling on Google, the original name for Paige and Brin's search engine was Back Rub, and this was its logo. Do with that as you will.
I love using my platform to make people more insane. The thing that initially separated Google from the other search engines was the page rank algorithm, which inspired by the academic citation system, ranked pages based off of how many sources linked back to that page rather than just how often the search word appeared on it.
Later on though, their real special sauce was in realizing that everything that you do when you go on a site creates data like footprints in the snow. Google was the first to realize that they could harness these data to improve the site and later to sell to advertisers. This is where Sergey Brin was able to really shine. He'd always had a deep fascination with this kind of stuff.
So much so that back at Stanford, he literally started a data mining club. And so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that he was interested in really pushing things way further than page rank. He'd talk about getting to a point where Google wasn't just a search engine, but really and truly knew the people using it on a deep level.
To be fair here, that does genuinely have positive applications. A search engine with more data is able to do a better job. However, as we'll see, this comes at a serious cost, too. The big one being surveillance. Google's Mountain View offices used to have a screen in their lobby that showed a live feed of random searches.
Visitors would often find themselves transfixed by the sight of it. And looking at what videos I could find, it's easy to see why. The constant stream of queries, each offering a slight glimpse into a random person's life, are mesmerizing. But eventually the screen was taken down on orders from Larry Page, who as the years had went on had grown increasingly paranoid that people might become aware of just how much the search giant was spying on them.
His fears were realized in 2006 when AOL, whose search engine was powered by Google, released a few gigs of anonymized search queries into the public domain. And oh boy, first of all, the word anonymized is doing some really heavy lifting there. While each user is just represented by a bunch of random characters, that doesn't really do much to protect their privacy.
Since if you look through everything someone Googles, it becomes very easy to find out just everything about them. The New York Times actually ran an amazing, if a little bit ethically ambiguous, story where they did just that. They looked at every search made by user number 44177749 and it didn't take them long to figure out just about everything about her.
Also though, some of these get very dark. For example, here are a few searches by user number 5342598. Unsolved murders in San Jose. Tara Morowski. Unsolved murder of Tara uh Morowski. Tara Morowski found dead in car. Unsolved mysteries. Tara Morowski. San Jose Police Department. Cold cases. Psychological test given to prisoners. Test to see if you are a serial killer. Honestly, I can see why they didn't want that in their lobby.
Just welcome to Google. Check out our little live feed where you can gaze into the bottomless abyss of human depravity. And to be fair to Google for a minute, what the [ __ ] are you supposed to do with that? Like that for sure sounds like this person killed a woman, right? But who knows? I definitely don't think that anyone who spends a night going down a true crime rabbit hole should be brought in for questioning.
But it seems pretty insane to just say that nothing should be done with that information either. I hope they at least stop serving this guy ads for zip ties and chloroform. In 2004, Brin took things further when they unveiled Gmail. It offered one gig of free storage, which was completely unheard of at the time.
The reason they did this though, and why they still offer 15 free gigabytes today, is because in exchange, they get to read every single one of their users emails. When people started realizing how much Google was tracking them, there was a lot of criticism. Google didn't make any statements or answer any questions about the extent of this tracking, but a quick look at their patents made it clear how far this went.
All mail was read and parsed. Same goes for all attachments. All names were matched to real identities and addresses through a user's Gmail address book and or through a third-party database. They collected and compiled demographic and psychological profiles on everyone with things like age, gender, marital status, sexuality, social class, and personality type.
This also didn't just apply to Gmail users, but anyone who sent an email to them. Luckily though, they weren't about to get away with things that easily. In response to the controversy, California State Senator Liz Figueroa introduced legislation that would prevent email providers from collecting data on users unless all parties explicitly consented.
In other words, it would all but kill Google. Data is their food. Didn't you see the War of the World documentary with Ice Cube? Do you want Google to starve? Bren and Paige went into defense mode, using their connections to get lots of favorable press coverage and eventually had a meeting with Figureroa herself, which um here's how that went.
All of a sudden, Sergey started talking to me. How would you feel if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records, read your love letters, read everything. But before leaving the house, it imploded. That's no violating privacy. I immediately said, "Of course it is." And he said, "No, it isn't. Nothing's capped. Nobody knows about it. That robot has read everything.
Does that robot know if I'm sad or if I'm feeling fear?" And he looked at me and he said, "Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that." Shockingly, despite Brin making one of the most chillingly effective cases for butan jihad I've ever heard, Senator Figueroa didn't back down. And so Paige and Brinn pulled out the big guns. Al [ __ ] Gore.
See, after allowing the 2000 presidential election to be stolen from him, Gore had been looking for a way to reinvent himself. In Steven Levy's book, In the Plex, Gore is actually quoted as saying that I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life. I just think it's very funny for a 52-year-old former vice president to be trying to find himself.
Anyway, rather than a Euro trip or planting trees for a summer, Gore decided to settle into the cushy job of tech investor, which seemed to largely involve him just taking board seats at various tech companies purely so that they could bring him out for situations like the one Google had found themselves in.
Gore invited the senator to his hotel room and gave her one of his famous PowerPoint presentations, which was apparently enough to convince her to drop the bill, saving Gmail. There was a New York Times article about this controversy that purely focused on glazing Google and it ends by saying, quote, "The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computergenerated ads.
Those people are free to ignore or even badmouth Gmail, but they shouldn't try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it. Yeah, cool. How's that working out for you, bud? But now to understand one of the biggest changes for Google, let's go back to 2001 when a guy named John Hank was launching Keyhole Incorporated.
Hank had a pretty interesting resume. He'd worked at a US embassy in Myanmar before changing up his career by enrolling in an MBA program at Berkeley. While in school, he joined a game design startup called Archetype Interactive, where he worked on a game called Meridian 59, the first 3D MMO RPG.
In true NBA fashion, Hank and his associates sold the game the day they graduated and then moved on to their next gaming startup called the Big Picture Network, which despite not producing anything of note, was bought in 2000 for 17.1 million by e Universe, the company that would later come to own MySpace, but at the time was flushed with cash and buying basically any sketchy web startup that they could.
Now, even though you've probably never heard of it, Keyhole would go on to be the most pivotal project for Jon and probably the thing I'm talking about in this video that you interact with the most. Named after the CIA's secret keyhole spy satellites from the '60s, Keyhole, Inc. was inspired by the Neil Stevenson book Snow Crash, which is a sentence you can say about almost all the most insanely dystopian projects in modern tech.
Uh, if you don't know Snow Crash, it's basically the realworld book that the Torment Nexus meme is based off of. Keyhole was specifically inspired by a computer program in the book called Planet Earth, which was created by the Central Intelligence Corporation, a company created by the merger of the Library of Congress and the CIA. In the book, Planet Earth is a VR simulation that stores all the spatial information the CIC owns, which as the name suggests is most of it.
Hank and his team developed a 3D engine like the kind in the games they'd cut their teeth on and used it to stitch together satellite images to create a model of the real world. This was genuinely groundbreaking stuff, but there was one small snag. While a few years earlier, Jon had been able to sell what was a basically worthless game studio for 8 figures, Keyhole launched in 2003, just as the dot boom was coming to an end.
And so, this actually amazing tech couldn't keep the lights on. That is until they got a cash infusion from Sony, in Nvidia, and most importantly, the fine folks over at Inqutel, the CIA's venture capital firm. We hate inkout, don't we, Spider? Yeah. Yeah.
You would tell me if you would been working in counterinsurgency, wouldn't you, Spider? What's that? You have Project Phoenix. Seeing the long-term potential, the CIA and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or NGA poured a classified amount of money into Keyhole. They weren't just investors either, but also clients who then began using the technology for military operations, most notably Operation Iraqi Freedom, where it impressed the generals with its video game-like ease.
Soon, Google also got interested. Brin personally demonstrated it for Google executives by barging into a meeting and using the app to zoom in on the homes of everyone there. You know, cool boss stuff. Google bought keyhole in 2004 and soon turned it into Google Earth.
John Hank was kept on board and in 2010 was put in charge of Niantic where he went on to create PokΓ©mon Go. But in purchasing the company, Google got much more than just Keyhole and Hank. They also got Keyhole's CIA contacts who sat on the board and were more than happy to work with Google to help them get some of that sweet sweet MIC money.
Now, this wasn't Google's first time stepping into defense. In 2003, they got 2.1 mil from the NSA for making them a search engine that could scan millions of documents in 24 languages. Just saying. People used to firebomb Arpa's labs for doing so much less than that. I hate to say it, but maybe college students really have gone soft.
Regardless, after the keyhole acquisition, things really ramped up. Soon they were regularly hiring people from the Army, Air Force, CIA, Loheed Martin, Rathon, you name it. Some notable examples of the kinds of programs they took on included partnering with Lockheed to make the NGA a visual system that mapped US bases in Iraq and Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad in 2007.
Then in 2008, Google won the contract to run the servers and search engine for Intellipedia, the CIA's Wikipedia that's run by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and all the other three-letter agencies. Edit notes on that one must be crazy. Note to all, please stop cluttering up this serious article of a CIA asset with fan site links and thirst traps. post those instead on the dedicated page Lee Hottie Oswald.
Also in 2008, Google launched a private spy satellite called GOI1 in partnership with the NGA. Then in 2010, the NGA gave Google a $27 million contract for geospatial visualization services without making them compete with anyone else. The NGA defended the decision, saying that they had no choice but to go with Google since they'd spent so long working together already that no one else could meet their needs.
In 2013, Google bought Boston Dynamics, itself seeded by DARPA, but then sold it in 2017 when the Pentagon decided that the robots weren't suitable for its uses. So, as you can see, things were going great. Google was happily engaging in all of this and more while still proudly displaying their old motto, don't be evil.
Turns out that is exactly what an evil corporation would say. But then in 2013, Larry Page's nightmare of the general public realizing the extent of Google surveillance returned and this time it was far worse than the AOL leaks. It all started on June 3rd of that year when the journalists Laura Pitris, Euan McCascal, and Glenn Greenwald walked into the Mirror Hotel in Hong Kong to meet with a contact they knew only as Verax, which translates to truthteller in Latin.
His real name was of course Edward Snowden and the documents he leaked revealed massive surveillance networks being run by the governments of multiple countries which amounted to essentially total surveillance of the internet. One of the biggest of these was the NSA's Prism system, which essentially works as an ondemand tap in the data centers of all the biggest names in Silicon Valley, granting the NSA access to any and all information you can think of, from chats to photos to emails to attachments to address books to physical locations.
Prism was started in 2007 under Bush, but was expanded by Obama. By 2013, it was being used to monitor the online actions of over a 100,000 people. What made it particularly unique, though, was that unlike other similar programs which involved intelligence agencies hacking into these companies, in this case, the scale and depth of the surveillance was so vast that there was no way that these back doors could have been made without help from the companies involved. Per the Washington Post, quote, "The engineering problems are so immense in
systems of such complexity and frequent change that the FBI and NSA would be hardpressed to build in back doors without active help from each company." This was a massive revelation. After it came out, each company involved began desperately claiming that they had no knowledge of the program and were themselves victims of a secret government plot instead of knowing collaborators.
Unfortunately, the document Snowden leaked told a very different story. This heroic truthteller had them by the balls. With just a few sentences, he would have been able to unveil the surveillance network they had helped in building. but he didn't. And that's where I'm going to leave you today.
In my next video, I'm going to get into why what caused Snowden to hold back, as well as the bizarre ideology that connects him, the Cold War hawks at ARPA, the hippie communes, and Silicon Valley Tech. Thanks for watching. [Music] Heat Heat [Music] Heat. Heat.
[Music]
