Was Surveillance the Purpose of the Internet?

left, the all seeing eye

David Livingstone implies that all-pervasive
surveillance was the intention, and not an
accidental byproduct of the personal computer
& Internet.

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.

(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.