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Mind Control

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Pascal Rousseau

Épilogue

Chipnapped1

Jeffrey Sconce

Texte intégral

  • 1 The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insa (...)
  • 2 Marc De Hert, Geerdt Magiels, Eric Thys, The Secret of the Brain Chip: A Self-Help Guide for Peop (...)

1The Secret of the Brain-Chip, a graphic novel published in 2003, presents the story of a troubled college student named Paul.2 As it opens, Paul is already having difficulties. A professor addresses him in class, but Paul feels disorientated and flees the room in confused anger. Another student tries to help, but she seems to be “far away,” and Paul suddenly realizes he can no longer understand what she is saying. Walking alone that night on a deserted street, Paul hears a voice: “Hey idiot…” At this juncture, with Paul experiencing his first auditory hallucination, the story pauses to provide psychiatric context, a voice of diagnostic authority speaking as black stype on a plain white page: “A psychosis often starts slowly and quietly. Strange things happen to you.” A list of early “prodromal” symptoms follows: reclusiveness, forgetfulness, depression, insomnia, suspicion. Paul’s story resumes. The voices continue to plague him, despite his best efforts to go on with his daily routines. Then one night at his desk, Paul looks into the lens of a camera, and “the pieces of the puzzle [fall] into place.” “I was a guinea-pig in a horrible experiment,” Paul realizes. “I was being observed all the time. Unscrupulous scientists were testing my reactions and influencing me by means of a chip they had implanted in my brain. Via satellites they could beam those voices at me. And everybody knew about it.” Paul’s father takes him to the doctor. But “there was no way I was going to cooperate,” fumes Paul. “From now on everyone was suspect.” Hearing on the radio that pieces of a defective satellite are soon expected to fall back to Earth, Paul spends the next day at a local shopping mall so “the thick layers of reinforced concrete” will protect him from space debris. As he walks through the mall, tired and disheveled, almost every object he encounters becomes a significant clue warning of the looming disaster. Finally, Paul walks up to the display window of an electronics store, where a closed-circuit video camera feeds a bank of television sets. The spectacle of his face multiplied and staring back at him on a dozen TV screens confirms Paul’s worst nightmare. He becomes acutely psychotic—so much so that security guards must subdue him.

2As a “Self-Help Guide for People Experiencing Psychosis,” The Secret of the Brain Chip is intended as a psychiatric prophylactic. Ideally, a counselor or physician gives a copy of the comic to an individual exhibiting the early symptoms of an impending psychotic episode. As an intervention, The Secret of the Brain-Chip must thread a difficult needle. How does one signify psychosis to those becoming psychotic (in a world where consensus over psychosis itself is increasingly in doubt)? As an educational example for the potentially psychotic, Paul’s brain chip must signify a delusion that is clearly delusional. Yet in attempting to capture a typical psychotic progression, the story employs a conceit that, for many, appears increasingly feasible. The comic book’s prophylactic power is thus profoundly dependent on the timing of its reception. If encountered early in a psychotic progression, the reader perhaps will still have enough attachment to the social world to read the book as a cautionary tale and heed its advice. However, if a delusional system has already materialized, the distortive perspective of paranoid psychosis is likely to integrate the comic’s message as yet another “sign,” much like Paul’s reaction to the random symbols at the shopping mall.

3The timing of this comic book also has implications within the cultural history of technology. As of 2019, we the putatively sane can still generally agree that dentists working for the Illuminati are not injecting microchips into random molars. But the self-evident insanity of the “chipnapped” (as these individuals occasionally refer to themselves) is certainly less self-evident now than it was in the 1950s and will most likely be even less self-evident in the coming decades. To even the casual observer, neuroscience and nanotechnology continue to make great strides, and many of us would certainly concede there are powers in the world that would very much like to have access to brain-chip technology. Are we certain they will not use it? Moreover, if this technology did exist, how would we know for certain they have not already used it? How well do you know your dentist, anyway? Our certainty that the chipnapped are insane depends on our generally unexamined commitment to a consensus narrative as to the probable parameters of technology and power, an account that the eccentric, psychotic, and otherwise “insane” choose for a variety of reasons not to endorse fully, if at all. Published at a moment in which research in electronic prosthetics is accelerating, The Secret of the Brain-Chip foregrounds what has always been a challenge unique to isolating technical delusions: Who is to say—and by what authority—which technologies do or do not actually exist? Who can say—and by what authority—how known technologies are actually being used? Who can know with any certainty what those in power will do with technologies of power to maintain their control? Today, as global flows of capital and information demand new structures of technical augmentation, these questions promise to become as insistent as they are unanswerable.

*

  • 3 American Psychiatric Association, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th (...)
  • 4 Carl C. Bell, “‘DMS -IV Guidebook’”, Journal of the American Medical Association, 274/22, 1995, p (...)

4Given the quantitative importance of delusions as necessarily qualitative symptoms, psychiatry has long sought to define them in the most precise and reliable terms possible. The dsm-IV (in authority from 1994 to 2013) defined a delusion as “a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.”3 Reinforcing this rather fuzzy frame of consensus reality, previous editions of the dsm also distinguished between “bizarre” and “unbizarre” delusions. To coach clinicians in this close interpretative call, the dsm-IV Guidebook” defined “unbizarre” delusions as “involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or love.” “Bizarre” delusions, by extension, involved situations that the psychiatrist, as an ambassador of sane society, judged to be impossible (the “dsm-IV Guidebook” uses the example of an individual convinced his brain has been transplanted from another body). Distinguishing the “bizarre” from the “unbizarre” thus involved an interpretative judgment by the psychiatrist as to the likelihood of the patient’s delusion, a decision that said as much about the life experience of the clinician as it did about the psychology of the patient. As the author of the guidebook concludes, “One person’s bizarre is another person’s strange but plausible.”4

  • 5 Ibid., emphasis added.
  • 6 This device, available at SpyMall.com, is described under the product category “Electronic Reveng (...)
  • 7 F. Joseph Pompei, “Spotlight of Sound: Bringing Audio in Retail Environments into Focus,” Sound a (...)

5Technology only exacerbates the problem of finding a shared cultural frame for making a diagnosis, especially as the frontiers of technical development exceed the ability of any one person to speak from a position of absolute knowledge. Technical delusions are particularly corrosive to the dsm-IV’s distinction between “bizarre” and “unbizarre” delusions. Hoping to advise puzzled diagnosticians on the line dividing the bizarre and the unbizarre, the “dsm-IV Guidebook” advises, “One might make the judgment that a delusion is bizarre because it involves a mechanism that is technologically impossible.”5 And yet, there are already several known technologies capable of simulating psychotic symptoms. Various “spy shops” market devices designed to inflict “electronic revenge” on one’s clueless adversaries. There is the battery-powered Mind Molester, described with great enthusiasm by its marketer as emitting a “one-second electronic chirp every four minutes until the battery finally runs down. Due to the chirp’s frequency, duration, and sound characteristics, it’s a very, very difficult, time-consuming, frustrating and maddening task to locate the unit. And even if they find it, they’ll still have absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what they’ve found. Is it a ‘bug’? Is it a bomb? Only you know the truth!”6 At Thinkgeek.com, tormenters can purchase the Eviltron (or an entire Annoy-a-tron Prankster Pack). Once secreted within a target’s home, the Eviltron randomly generates “unsettling creaking, unidentifiable scratching sounds” and a “gasping last breath.” A “sinister laughing child” and an eerie whisper (“Hey, can you hear me?”) are also available options. Upping the hallucinatory ante, the Holosonics corporation markets “audio spotlight” devices that allow sound to be focused in a beam so that only one individual in a crowded room can hear it. Court tv, a cable network in the United States, quickly recognized the psychotic implications of this technology and deployed the devices in a guerrilla promotional campaign for its new series Murder by the Book. The campaign involved installing Holosonic devices in various coffee shops and bookstores in New York City. “As shoppers browsed the shelves,” a reporter noted, “select shoppers would hear a faint whisper ask them: ‘Hey. Do you ever think about murder? I do.’”7

  • 8 Dorinda Elliott and John Barry, “A Subliminal Dr. Strangelove”, Newsweek, August 22, 1994, p. 57.
  • 9 David Hambling, “Microwave Ray Gun Controls Crowds with Noise”, New Scientist, July 3, 2008.
  • 10 Dan Cairns, “US Army Heat Ray Gun in Afghanistan”, BBC Newsbeat, July 15, 2010.

6Owners of boutiques, burger joints, and bookstores may have no long-term interest in driving their customers insane, but most will concede that the government would have few to no qualms about employing forms of sonic torture on its enemies. In fact, the US government already has an established track record in developing and deploying such technologies. After the disastrous end to the government’s siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) admitted having conferred with Igor Smirnov, a Russian experimenter with electromagnetic frequencies whom Newsweek subtly described as “a subliminal Dr. Strangelove.”8 Smirnov specialized in embedding subliminal voices into electronic feeds, and the fbi apparently considered using his techniques to implant the voice of God—performed by Charlton Heston, no less—into cult leader David Koresh’s phone line during their negotiations. More recently, the US military has deployed a device called medusa (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio). As described in the pages of New Scientist, medusa uses short microwave pulses to “rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognizable sounds.”9 This shockwave is very unpleasant and causes the targeted skull to flee post haste. Raytheon’s Active Denial System (ads), another “nonlethal” technology of crowd control, can transmit a microwave ray up to 1,600 feet, producing the effect of “intolerable heat” and causing “whoever it’s pointed at to immediately start moving away.”10

  • 11 David Ewing Duncan, “Implanting Hope”, Technology Review, 108/3, 2005, p. 48-54.
  • 12 Carles Grau et al., “Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technolo (...)
  • 13 Greg Walters, “High-Speed ‘Brain Modem’ Could Restore Vision, Speech, and Movement”, Seeker.com, (...)

7At the dawn of the twenty-first century, brain chips are slowly dissolving the distinction between “bizarre” and “unbizarre” delusions. Under the guidance of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa), research in brain-computer interface (bci) technology began at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1970s.11 In 2005, Matthew Nagle became the first recipient of Brain Gate, described by his doctors as a “mind-reading brain chip.” After implantation, Nagle, who was paralyzed from the neck down in 2001, could manipulate a computer cursor mentally, allowing him to “think” his tv on and off and to move a prosthetic arm. A new clinical trial in Brain Gate technology began in 2008, and in 2010 darpa announced a $15 million initiative to continue refining bci research. In September 2014, scientists announced the first successful transmission in “brain-to-brain” contact. The experiment involved a subject thinking a word, which a helmet of electrodes then translated into electromagnetic pulses. These pulses, transmitted over the Internet, were then received and decoded in the mind of Subject B. “It is a kind of technological realization of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical,” announced theoretical physicist Giulio Ruffini. “We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain.”12 In 2017, darpa awarded a company $18 million to research a bci capable of transferring information into the brain at speeds greater than one gigabit per second.13

  • 14 Nadeem Raza, Viv Bradshaw, Matthew Hague, Applications of RFID Technology, London, Institute of E (...)
  • 15 Amy Maxmen, “Digital Pills Make Their Way to Market”, Nature, July 30, 2012.
  • 16 Matt Bettonville, “Chip Moves Wirelessly in Bloodstream”, Stanford Daily, February 23, 2012.

8A growing number of individuals believe that brain chips, while not (yet) implanted in their own skulls perhaps, constitute a very real and looming danger for society at large. Privacy activists and other functional paranoids note with alarm that the Radio Frequency Identification (rfid) chip is opening the door to more invasive forms of data monitoring. Implanted in objects ranging from credit cards to cocker spaniels, rfid chips contain large amounts of embedded data that can be accessed by a scanner. One does not need to be a raving lunatic to foresee that rfid chips, in conjunction with cellular and gps technology, may very well be introduced in the human population as a means of consolidating information about medical histories, consumer profiles, movement patterns, and citizenship status.14 In 2012, both the United Kingdom and the United States approved the use of pills equipped with tiny rfid chips, ostensibly to monitor a patient’s vital signs and supervise her medication schedule.15 Also in 2012, researchers at Stanford University announced success in creating a microchip capable of swimming through the bloodstream under wireless power and direction—perhaps into the brain.16 Needless to say, such technologies and their possible affordances are of extreme interest to the “chipnapped.” The chipnapped, in turn, would be quick to remind us that these technologies are all in the public record. Who knows what darpa and other tech firms are doing in secret?

*

  • 17 “Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence”: A (...)

9Recognizing that cultural norms do not provide particularly stable ground for identifying delusions, technical or otherwise, the most recent revision of the dsm, published in 2013, shifts the definition of a delusion from the terrain of consensus and plausibility to that of falsity and conviction. Suppressing the contentious politics of normative thought, at least in terms of content, the dsm-V now recognizes delusions according to the individual’s depth of conviction, lack of insight, and steadfast resistance to compelling counterevidence.17 In a related revision, the dsm-V has also eliminated the distinction between the “bizarre” and “unbizarre.” On the one hand, the dsm-V’s renunciation of “cultural standards” appears to be a concession, however oblique, to modernity’s philosophical and sociological critiques of “normality.” With the relativistic question of plausibility off the table, delusions can now be established by the patient’s steadfast conviction in a belief that is untrue, even when presented with objective, empirical evidence of its falsity. Problem solved.

10Or perhaps not. In the dsm-V’s new definition, the ambiguity of delusional thought has been acknowledged in terms of the variability of normative belief and yet has been put back under repression through an appeal to the empirical demonstration of falsehood. Eliminating the criterion of cultural consensus belies the fact that “depth of conviction” and “resistance to counterevidence” are themselves subject to implicit cultural standards, political norms, and historical tolerances. Put simply, a given society at a given historical moment remains amenable to indulging some (fantastical) beliefs more than others.

  • 18 17 “About Doreen Virtue”, http://www.angeltherapy.com/about.php.
  • 19 Doreen Virtue, How to Hear Your Angels, Carlsbad, Hay House, 2007.

11Under the new criteria, for example, what is to be done with Doreen Virtue, Ph.D.? On July 15, 1995, an “angel” warned Virtue that her car would be stolen that afternoon. Virtue, who in 1995 was a practicing psychotherapist and the founder of the Womankind Psychiatric Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, ignored these warnings. Her website continues the narrative: “Despite this, the angel did not abandon Doreen in her most dire moment—as she was parking, two armed men, intent on a carjacking, brandished weapons and physically accosted the unsuspecting Doreen. The voice spoke to her again—it was loud, distinctly male, and it instructed her to scream with all her might. This time she listened, and her life was saved by passers-by who became alarmed and sent her attackers running.”18 From this epiphany, Virtue went on to create a formidable business empire based on the concept of “angel therapy.” She is the author of dozens of self-help books that hybridize angel-centric Victorian spiritualism with a range of mystical systems taken from across history, including numerology (Angel Numbers 101 [2008]), Vedic philosophy (Chakra Clearing [2004]), and fantasy-inflected tarot (Magical Unicorn Oracle Cards [2005]). Before her conversion to a more orthodox form of Christianity in 2017, Virtue also endorsed the reality of “Fairies,” guardian angels for pets, and “indigo children.” Throughout Virtue’s oeuvre, there is an emphasis on learning how to hear one’s own angels speak, an irony that is not lost on Virtue herself: “I think it’s ironic that I, a former psychotherapist who once worked in locked hospital psychiatric wards, now teach people how to hear voices!”19

12Virtue would appear to fulfill the criteria for delusional thought under any and all iterations of the dsm. And yet, throughout her “New Age” career, she remained unimpeded by psychiatric and legal authorities for her purported belief that angels might assist a person picking lottery numbers. Her success in print and on the lecture circuit speaks to a general willingness to protect as sane those individuals who still maintain an archaic belief in instrumental angelic supervision. If an individual were to complain that the Central Intelligence Agency (cia) monitored his activities twenty-four hours a day, and that he could see agents prowling in the bushes outside his house, said individual would no doubt be diagnosed as paranoid. Yet as a society, we continue to go to great lengths to accommodate as sane those individuals who appear to truly believe God observes everyone all the time, even if most would (at this point in history) consider surveillance by the cia more plausible (if still highly improbable).

  • 20 Norma J. Milanovich, Betty Rice, Cynthia Ploski, We, the Arcturians, Albuquerque, Athena, 1990, p (...)
  • 21 Ibid., p. 162.

13Slightly more modern but no less insulated from proofs of falsity are claims of extraterrestrial contact. In the spring of 1985, while sitting alone in a conference room at the Albuquerque Technical-Vocational Institute, Dr. Norma J. Milanovich heard a voice tell her to “pick up a pen.”20 She did. In the months that followed, Milanovich engaged in many sessions of voice-directed “automatic writing”—so many, in fact, that she soon had to switch to a computer to engage in automatic typing. Gradually transformed into a “multidimensional channel,” Milanovich found herself under the tutelage of Beings known as “Monka and Kuthumi”: “To my amazement, the transmission that came through stated that those communicating were Beings from Arcturus, who were riding on a Starship that was situated to the southeast of Albuquerque.” Later, by the telekinetic repositioning of a crystal on her desk, Milanovich began an extensive dialogue with the Arcturians, asking them about their home planet, nourishment, and clothing. Later, the Arcturians familiarized Milanovich and her friends with their invisible starship’s thirty-five compartments, including “the old and new vaporizing chambers,” “the Reunion Quarters for those who are in the reproduction mode,” and “the duty free port” where the Arcturians exchange goods beyond those manifested “on the materialistic plane of the third dimensional reality of earth.”21

14Many “ufo religions” have revisited the Book of Genesis to produce an account of creation that might reconcile older conceptions of God with the revelations of twentieth-century physics. The Urantia Book, published in 1955 (but dictated during the 1930s and 1940s by an anonymous “sleeping subject” in contact with “celestial beings”), combined Christian exegesis with modern cosmology to posit an “Isle of Paradise” at the center of the universe. The pulp author-turned-seafaring guru L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology in 1953. Those who become Scientologists begin by undergoing a process of “auditing.” Employing the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-meter), auditing involves purging new initiates of their “reactive mind” until they are “cleared.” Scientology also professes a belief in “implants,” but as with so many other religions, it is difficult to know whether Hubbard meant for these implants to be interpreted literally or figuratively. The full cosmology of Scientology is too intricate to explicate in full here, but it essentially involves the contamination of our sector of the universe by “thetan” energies, soul-like entities blasted from their original bodies seventy-five million years ago by hydrogen bomb explosions ordered by Xenu, then the director of the Galactic Confederacy. While many Scientologists argue that this narrative should be read allegorically, much like the Old Testament, Hubbard nevertheless gave the various implants a very specific, technical nomenclature (such as the “R6” and “Helatrobus” implants, the latter installed by an ancient intergalactic government that spoke to living creatures by taking the form of clouds).

  • 22 “How to Detect and/or Disable an Implanted RFID Chip”, http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/m (...)

15Institutionalizing those who believe in angels, Arcturians, and Xenu would prove a very difficult medical and legal task. In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution allows a citizen to believe in any form of religious magic that he or she might choose, with wide latitude as to the intensity and irrationality of said magic. Meanwhile, appeals to teleportation, invisibility cloaks, mind beams, time travel, and other technological wonders allow aliens to elude any and all skeptical resistance to the reality of their existence. In an odd twist for those who believe they are the victims of technical control, the utter implausibility of supernatural and super-scientific beliefs generally protects these systems from psychiatric assessment. Lacking the ability to motivate their beliefs in the distant past or a faraway galaxy, the “fixity” and “conviction” of the chipnapped would appear to make them more vulnerable to being diagnosed as delusional. God and Xenu cannot be proved in any empirical sense; therefore, no “counterevidence” can be offered to disprove their existence. But a brain chip is a material object, made and implanted by fellow humans in the contemporary historical moment. Demonstrable proof of its nonexistence can be provided by showing the chipnapped an X-ray of his skull. Or can it? A technician you have never met emerges from another room and shows you an X-ray of your troubled brain. What does that prove? “An x-ray will prove nothing,” opines an online commenter in a mind-control forum, “as these people are aware of what is going on, the same as most dentists, and are part of the deception and game.”22 Accordingly, many chipnapped individuals recognize that requesting an X-ray to locate a brain chip will likely earn them a psychiatric admission, forcing them to seek “friendly” physicians who might be more sympathetic and discreet. None of this should be surprising. If there were an entity capable of injecting brain chips on a mass scale—whether it is the government, the Freemasons, or extraterrestrials—it stands to reason that this entity would also possess sophisticated techniques for concealing these powers.

  • 23 VeriChip Corporation, form S-1 filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, December 29, 2 (...)

16Now that brain chips exist, the terrain for judging fixity and conviction has shifted from questions of technical feasibility to estimations of political will. Brain-chip delusions remain “psychotic” to the extent that the consensus reality of contemporary society must believe that no organization could actually succeed in such a scheme. Just as plausibility and bizarreness in technical delusions once depended on qualitative judgments as to likely technological affordances, the new standard of falsity and conviction depends on estimating the political powers possessed by those thought to be behind these technologies. Pressed about how a brain chip could make its way into the skull without an individual’s knowledge, the chipnapped will argue that any surgical procedure, dental appointment, or even routine vaccination provides more than enough opportunity for an implantation. Asked who is behind the random brain chipping of the population, victims nominate those suspects most associated with “black ops” capabilities: the fbi, the United Nations, the cia, nasa, interpol, mi6, the kgb. Particularly suspect are the classified projects of darpa and the surprisingly candid marketing of ibm’s VeriChip program. As the research division of the US Defense Department, darpa brands itself with the thoroughly paranoid slogan, “Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise.” At ibm, meanwhile, VeriChip (an injectable rfid chip) received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006 for use in human beings. Calling the technology (with weirdly dark irony) “rfid for the People,” ibm has opened the door on human implantation by touting the technology’s value in storing medical information for patients who have difficulty communicating with physicians. Additional uses include “infant protection systems used to prevent mother-baby mismatching and infant abduction” and “wander prevention systems used for protection and location of residents in long-term care facilities.”23

  • 24 George C. Jones v. Dr. Allen L. Ault, 67 F.R.D. 124 (S.D. Ga. 1974).
  • 25 George C. Jones, Petitioner v. Dr. Allen L. Ault et al.
  • 26 Sean Munger, “Bill Clinton Bugged My Brain: Delusional Claims in Federal Courts”, Tulane Law Revi (...)

17Recognizing that the forces behind these technologies are unlikely to admit their involvement or reveal the extent of their actual powers, some have taken these issues to court, hoping (perhaps naïvely) that the judicial branch still retains enough autonomy to make Big Techno Power speak its truths. In 1974, George C. Jones, an inmate in the Georgia State Prison, sued the state for using “a machine or device by which [the] brain is probed and monitored by electric or parabolic sound waves designed to achieve behavioral control.”24 The judge, somewhat surprisingly, was not entirely unsympathetic to Jones’s claims. At the very least, he considered it an interesting intellectual exercise, writing, “The Fourth Amendment contention raises the questions of whether thought interception by means of electronic brain-scanning is a search or seizure of one’s person and whether or not thoughts by themselves constitute ‘effects’ within the meaning of such constitutional provision.”25 Given that the victim of a brain chip, real or imagined, is often living in poverty or institutional confinement, many cases are dismissed under those portions of the US Legal Code pertaining to screening and evidence for proceedings in forma pauperis. Title 28 of the US Code allows the court to dismiss cases deemed “frivolous, malicious, or [that] fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.”26 As this standard suggests, claims about brain chips are typically considered demonstrably false before they can even reach the court for adjudication, thus making it structurally impossible to prove their existence within the legal system. The chipnapped thus face twin threats of invisibility, denied “discovery” to gather more information on a device that is by definition “undiscoverable.”

  • 27 “Final Order—Protection from Stalking”, December 30, 2008, in Walbert v. Redford, District Court, (...)

18But the chipnapped have not been dissuaded from seeking legal remedy. Victims of electronic harassment are especially enthusiastic about the case of James Walbert in Wichita, Kansas. Having invented an “antimicrobial sanitary seal for 12-ounce aluminum beverage cans,” Walbert entered a business partnership to market his innovation. After the partnership dissolved, Walbert claimed that his former business partner immediately began to stalk him and his family members with “electronic and microwave devices,” adding, in response to a court questionnaire, that the defendant’s conduct had made him feel “stalked, the guy is straight creepy.”27 When the defendant did not appear in court to defend himself against these allegations, the judge granted Walbert his court order of protection, making Walbert the first known plaintiff to “win” a case of alleged electronic harassment.

  • 28 Jim Guest to Missouri Legislature, letter, October 10, 2007, http://www.stopthecrime.net/jimguest (...)
  • 29 Space Preservation Act of 2001 (HR 2977)
  • 30 See Michigan Public Acts (2003), Acts 256–257.
  • 31 U.S. Congress and Senate Judiciary Committee, “Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of John G. (...)

19Walbert’s court victory in Wichita was to some degree secured by a letter of support he obtained from former State Congressman Jim Guest of Missouri. “I have worked for 3 years with Microwave and Electronic Harassment victims throughout the U.S. and overseas,” Guest wrote. “It is hard for others to understand the technology that is being used to destroy people’s lives. I know James because he contacted me for help.”28 The year before Walbert’s case, Guest wrote to his fellow legislators to ask for their help “for the many constituents in our country who are being affected unjustly by electronic weapons torture and covert harassment groups. Serious privacy rights violations and physical injuries have been caused by the activities of these groups and their use of so-called non-lethal weapons on men, women, and even children.” In addition to filing lawsuits, the chipnapped and electronically harassed have a history of lobbying various legislatures to bring an end to these practices. In 2000, Congressman Denis Kucinich of Ohio introduced legislation that would have outlawed direct energy weapons (dews), defined in the bill as any “means inflicting death or injury on, or damaging or destroying, a person (or the biological life, bodily health, mental health, or physical and economic well-being of a person)… through the use of land-based, sea-based, or space-based systems using radiation, electromagnetic, sonic, laser, or other energies directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control of such persons or populations.”29 The federal bill went nowhere. But in 2004, Michigan became the first state to criminalize harassment using electromagnetic radiation devices—a rare victory for the chipnapped.30 In 2007, meanwhile, politicians and psychotics alike took notice at the confirmation hearings of the US Supreme Court nominee John Roberts when Joe Biden, the future US vice-president, asked: “Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that. You will rule on that, mark my words, before your tenure is over.”31

  • 32 Alan Greenblatt, “Lawmakers Are Working on Anti-Brain-Chip Bill”, April 15, 2010, https://www.npr (...)
  • 33 Fredrick Kunkle, Rosalind Helderman, “An Issue of Privacy or Sign of the Apocalypse?”, Washington (...)

20Legal protections against electronic implants and harassment became an even more pressing issue with the election of President Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Convinced that America’s first African American president was a stealth Muslim intent on destroying the United States and instituting a socialist welfare state, a sizeable portion of conservative Americans gradually descended into a form of collective insanity. As refracted through the paranoid-entertainment complex of right-wing radio and Fox News, the biracial, Ivy League–educated, upper-middle-class Obama provided a compelling demon for those alienated white men who perceived themselves as structurally disenfranchised in twenty-first-century America. All politics being local, as the saying goes, conservative lawmakers from districts gerrymandered for maximum paranoia have been very responsive to this voting bloc, including those who fear that “the government” might one day compel citizens to receive microchip and brain-chip implants. Although he could cite no evidence that such implantations were actually taking place, or that any plans existed for such implantations to take place at any time in the foreseeable future, State Representative Ed Seltzer of Georgia argued he was simply being “proactive” in introducing a bill that would make it a misdemeanor to implant “microchips, sensors, transmitters or any other manner of tracking devices into individual against their will.”32 Such paranoia also intersects with the agenda of Christian fringe groups who believe the biochip is the “mark of the Beast” predicted in the Book of Revelations (the mark of the Beast was previously thought to be the Universal Price Code). This group, too, has found an advocate in the legislature. “I just think you should have the right to control your own body,” State Representative Mark L. Cole of Virginia told the Washington Post. “My understanding—I’m not a theologian—but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times. Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”33

  • 34 “The BRAIN Initiative: Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies”, April 2, 2 (...)
  • 35 A. Paul Alivisatos et al., “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connec (...)

21Understandably, this constituency was nearly apoplectic when, on April 2, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to sponsor a government-funded Brain Initiative. Described by the White House as “a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury,” the Obama Brain Initiative, as the project soon became known, promised to support the Human Connectome Project in its bid to produce the definitive map of the brain’s neural networks (much as the Human Genome Project did with the genetic code).34 The participation of darpa in the project (“Better understanding of the human brain supports national security,” the agency argued in support of the Brain Initiative) only confirmed this plot, as did many of the materials included in the proposal. One researcher, for example, argued that it “will ultimately become feasible to deploy small wireless microcircuits, untethered in living brains, for direct monitoring of neuronal activity,” not to mention “safely and transiently introducing engineered cells to make tight (transient) junctions with neurons for recording and possibly programmable stimulation, or a combination of these approaches.”35 Paranoids of the political left and right now find common ground in the understanding that technological innovation obeys the structural demands of global economics, shareholder bottom lines, and militarized paranoia—systems that proved long ago they are capable of eluding any attempts at human intervention. Now that algorithms and data mining exceed battalions and carpet bombing in their ability to shape the future, agents known and unknown have every incentive to continue miniaturizing and consolidating their technical powers.

*

  • 36 For a summary of Napolis’s activities in this area, see Paul Bocij, Cyberstalking: Harassment in (...)
  • 37 The People, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Diana Napolis, Defendant and Appellant, D041854, Court o (...)

22The stakes of our seemingly inevitable rendezvous with the brain chip are vividly dramatized in the saga of Diane Napolis. In 2003, the State of California charged Napolis with one count of stalking and five counts of making criminal threats after she accused Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, of implanting a chip in her brain. In her declaration to the Superior Court, offered in response to a court-ordered mental evaluation, Napolis described a familiar narrative of high-tech persecution. Napolis claimed her former position as a social worker in San Diego had led her to expose cases of “ritual abuse.” She believed this work had angered Satanists and other powerful figures who shared an interest in promoting the idea of false memory syndrome, a useful strategy for discrediting those who might access memories of childhood torture and molestation.36 The account provided by Napolis links many individuals and organizations in this scheme, and while Spielberg and Capshaw are never mentioned by name, Napolis eventually invokes a “very wealthy Jewish Couple from Los Angeles” who, she feared, was about to come into possession of sophisticated technologies in “virtual reality, nsa [National Security Agency] tracking software, and more.” Napolis was concerned that one of the culture industry’s most powerful figures was about to access nsa-grade surveillance software, powerful brain chips, and the latest innovations in virtual reality. After Spielberg obtained a restraining order, Napolis somewhat inexplicably moved on to accusing actress Jennifer Love Hewitt of murder and mind control. Police finally arrested Napolis after she sent a threatening e-mail to a Hewitt fan site. Pronounced delusional and a paranoid schizophrenic by court psychiatrists,37 Napolis was committed to the Patton State Hospital and, upon release, given ten years’ probation. In 2008, Napolis brought suit against Michael Acquino, a former member of Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan and the founder, in 1975, of the Temple of Set. In her lawsuit, Napolis accused Aquino (along with six other people and San Diego State University) of conspiring to engineer the threat against Hewitt that resulted in Napolis’s arrest and institutionalization.

  • 38 Peter Cochrane, Tips for Time Travelers, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1999.
  • 39 Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, “Homo Electricus and the Continued Speciation of Humans”, in Maria (...)
  • 40 “Connected”, Daily Telegraph, July 18, 1996.
  • 41 Clive Crickmer, “Liven Up… Death Has Had Its Chips”, Daily Mail, July 18, 1996, p. 20.

23At the center of Napolis’s theory and subsequent legal troubles was a device known as the Soul Catcher Chip, so called for its ability to record (and play back) the entirety of the human sensorium (and, thus, the “soul”) of the implanted individual. Here Napolis appears to have suffered the misfortune of actually believing the predictions of a prominent figure in global telecommunications research. The Soul Catcher Chip was not a spontaneous hallucination on Napolis’s part; it was, instead, the invention of Peter Cochrane, the head of British Telecom.38 In 1999, Cochrane predicted the Soul Catcher Chip, a brain implant that would “act as an access point to the external world,” was on the near-horizon and would allow individuals to “download the mind onto computer hardware” to create “a global nervous system via wireless Internet.”39 Cochrane further predicted that thoughts and emotions would be downloadable by 2050. Another researcher at British Telecom argued it would soon be possible to “imbue a new-born baby with a lifetime’s experience by giving him or her the Soul Catcher chip of a dead person.”40 “This is the end of death,” observed Chris Winter, then head of British Telecom’s Artificial Life Team and lead researcher on Soul Catcher 2025. British Telecom’s resident “futurologist,” Ian Pearson, expressed this affordance in terms of Moore’s Law: “Over an 80-year life we process 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to the storage capacity of 7,142,857,142,860,000 floppy disks. If current trends in the miniaturization of computer memory continue at the rate of the past 20 years—a factor of 100 every decade—today’s eight megabyte memory chips norm will be able to store 10 terabytes in 30 years.”41

  • 42 Andrew Griffin, “Humans Will Become Hybrids by 2030, Says Leading Google Engineer, with Tiny Robo (...)
  • 43 Institute of Creative Technologies website, http://ict.usc.edu.
  • 44 Ibid.

24The residually sane recognize this discourse for what it is: a techno-futurist hubris prominent among Western scientists (in search of grants). For the borderline psychotic, however, it is difficult to imagine a more compelling explanation for the symptoms typical of prodromal schizophrenia. So even as a comic book such as The Secret of the Brain-Chip does its best to convince the prepsychotic that he or she does not have a brain chip, the head of British Telecom asserts with equal confidence, authority, and conviction that one’s entire sensorium and “self” will soon occupy a chip implanted behind the eye. Ray Kurzweil, meanwhile, as head of engineering at Google, predicts that by 2040 “most of our thinking will be non-biological.”42 And who better than Spielberg to orchestrate the final crossing over from the Society of the Spectacle to the Society of the Brainstem? He is a famous public figure, of course, but also widely regarded as the “Edison” of modern Hollywood, instrumental in creating the form of blockbuster spectacle that has come to dominate industrial output and audience imagination since the 1980s. In particular, his involvement in Jurassic Park (1993) foregrounded the magical possibilities of cgi technology, serving as a popular reference point in the public’s understanding of the digital image. Who else would have such a driving ambition to create pure spectacle in the brain, movies in the mind that would at last achieve the “myth of total cinema” by circumventing vision for direct neural excitation? The US military certainly understands the advantages of fusing the Spielberg aesthetic with computer imaging and tracking software. In 1999, the US Department of Defense partnered with the University of Southern California to create the Institute for Creative Technologies (ict). As part of its mission, the ict seeks to explore “techniques and technologies to improve the fluency of human-computer interactions and create visceral synthetic experiences.”43 Of course, the ability to program “visceral synthetic experiences” would be of immense interest to both the culture industry and the military-industrial complex, a synergistic opportunity actively promoted by the ict. The institute notes that its location in Los Angeles “facilitates collaboration with major movie and game makers. ict graphics innovations help create realistic computer-generated characters in Hollywood blockbusters and also enhance virtual characters for museum and military projects.”44

  • 45 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, New York, Random House, 2011.

25To make matters even more worrisome, Warner Brothers announced in March 2015 that Spielberg would direct the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One (2012). Riding a wave of dystopic young adult fiction, Ready Player One takes place in the mid-twenty-first century in a world where “real life” has become a desolate hellscape of poverty, crime, and collapsing infrastructure.45 To escape, most spend their time in oasis, a fully immersive virtual universe (literally—there are other virtual planets to visit by paying tolls that allow for shortcuts through this virtual time and space). A novel structured like a video game, Ready Player One chronicles Wade Watt’s search for three “Easter eggs” hidden in oasis by its creator James Halliday, who announces in his will that the first person to find all three Easter eggs (and solve the attending puzzles) will inherit his vast wealth, as well as administrative control of oasis. Knowing that Halliday was a child of the 1980s and obsessed with that era’s popular culture, Watts, his friends, and an evil corporation leverage their resources into mastering ’80s pop ephemera in a search for clues. Entire runs of 1980s sitcoms such as Family Ties (nbc, 1982-1989) must be reviewed like homework. Old video games such as Centipede and Tank Battle must be mastered. Nerd-film classics of the 1980s such as War Games (1983) and Blade Runner (1982) must be memorized line by line. The music of Duran Duran and Rush once again becomes current. Characterized as a dystopia for the novel’s teen readership, the story as adapted by Spielberg promised to be a utopian windfall for the entertainment industry. Not only did the movie have the potential for substantial box office success in 2018; it also presented perhaps the most diabolical vector ever devised for the synergistic repurposing of the culture industry’s vast archives. Younger viewers were introduced to the back catalogue of several franchises that have already proved quite lucrative for the entertainment industry. Older viewers, meanwhile, experienced the nostalgia of Spielberg applying the Spielberg aesthetic to properties that defined the era in which Spielberg helped introduce the Spielberg aesthetic that came to colonize popular culture over the next forty years.

26Popular history recounts that in 1945, just before the first test of the Atomic bomb, a group of scientists warned the U.S. government that the weapon’s fissile chain-reaction might not end, thus igniting the entirety of the atmosphere and destroying all life on the planet. In this respect, Spielberg’s Ready Player One was ultimately a dud. But as a theoretical model, the film opened the door for future techno-cultural engineering that may eventually succeed in trapping future generations in hermetically sealed franchises capable of infinite cannibalization, a universe of mise-en-abyme sequels and transmedial franchising where the novelty of self-reflexive repetition becomes the last play of difference. If successful, implanting brain chips may very well become redundant.

27To remain functional in our present reality, for the moment anyway, one simply must believe it impossible that Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Love Hewitt are installing brain chips to protect a ring of Satanists or to usher in a new era of neural entertainment franchises. For those who do believe in such a plot, however, appealing to consensus or counterevidence achieves little. In accusing Spielberg and threatening Hewitt, Napolis made the mistake of acting on her beliefs, thereby revealing the high levels of preoccupation and distress that earned her a psychiatric commitment. Yet if there was even the remotest chance that some alliance among Spielberg, Hewitt, darpa, the ict, the nsa, and Satan were about to plunge the world into the eternal “false consciousness” of the Soul Catcher Chip, what would be the acceptable levels of preoccupation, distress, and interference one could display without seeming insane? If one believes this future is even remotely possible, would it not be prudent to remain as distressed and preoccupied as possible?

Notes

1 The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019.

2 Marc De Hert, Geerdt Magiels, Eric Thys, The Secret of the Brain Chip: A Self-Help Guide for People Experiencing Psychosis, Antwerp, EPO, 2003.

3 American Psychiatric Association, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV), Washington, American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 765.

4 Carl C. Bell, “‘DMS -IV Guidebook’”, Journal of the American Medical Association, 274/22, 1995, p. 184.

5 Ibid., emphasis added.

6 This device, available at SpyMall.com, is described under the product category “Electronic Revenge”. See: http://www.spymall.com/catalog/revenge.html.

7 F. Joseph Pompei, “Spotlight of Sound: Bringing Audio in Retail Environments into Focus,” Sound and Communications, 55/7, July 20, 2009, p. 54-57, here p. 68.

8 Dorinda Elliott and John Barry, “A Subliminal Dr. Strangelove”, Newsweek, August 22, 1994, p. 57.

9 David Hambling, “Microwave Ray Gun Controls Crowds with Noise”, New Scientist, July 3, 2008.

10 Dan Cairns, “US Army Heat Ray Gun in Afghanistan”, BBC Newsbeat, July 15, 2010.

11 David Ewing Duncan, “Implanting Hope”, Technology Review, 108/3, 2005, p. 48-54.

12 Carles Grau et al., “Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies,” PLoS One 9, 8, 2014, e105225.

13 Greg Walters, “High-Speed ‘Brain Modem’ Could Restore Vision, Speech, and Movement”, Seeker.com, August 28, 2017.

14 Nadeem Raza, Viv Bradshaw, Matthew Hague, Applications of RFID Technology, London, Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1999.

15 Amy Maxmen, “Digital Pills Make Their Way to Market”, Nature, July 30, 2012.

16 Matt Bettonville, “Chip Moves Wirelessly in Bloodstream”, Stanford Daily, February 23, 2012.

17 “Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence”: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (DSM-V), Washington, American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 87.

18 17 “About Doreen Virtue”, http://www.angeltherapy.com/about.php.

19 Doreen Virtue, How to Hear Your Angels, Carlsbad, Hay House, 2007.

20 Norma J. Milanovich, Betty Rice, Cynthia Ploski, We, the Arcturians, Albuquerque, Athena, 1990, p. 20.

21 Ibid., p. 162.

22 “How to Detect and/or Disable an Implanted RFID Chip”, http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1190061/pg2

23 VeriChip Corporation, form S-1 filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, December 29, 2005.

24 George C. Jones v. Dr. Allen L. Ault, 67 F.R.D. 124 (S.D. Ga. 1974).

25 George C. Jones, Petitioner v. Dr. Allen L. Ault et al.

26 Sean Munger, “Bill Clinton Bugged My Brain: Delusional Claims in Federal Courts”, Tulane Law Review, 72, 1997, p. 1809-1850.

27 “Final Order—Protection from Stalking”, December 30, 2008, in Walbert v. Redford, District Court, Sedgwick County, Kansas, case no. 2008-DM-008649.

28 Jim Guest to Missouri Legislature, letter, October 10, 2007, http://www.stopthecrime.net/jimguestletteroctober102010.pdf

29 Space Preservation Act of 2001 (HR 2977)

30 See Michigan Public Acts (2003), Acts 256–257.

31 U.S. Congress and Senate Judiciary Committee, “Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr., to Be Chief Justice of the United States”, 109th Cong., 1st sess., September 15, 2005.

32 Alan Greenblatt, “Lawmakers Are Working on Anti-Brain-Chip Bill”, April 15, 2010, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2010/04/15/126023516/breathe-easy--ga--lawmakers-are-working-on-anti-brain-chip-bill.

33 Fredrick Kunkle, Rosalind Helderman, “An Issue of Privacy or Sign of the Apocalypse?”, Washington Post, February 10, 2010, B1.

34 “The BRAIN Initiative: Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies”, April 2, 2013,

35 A. Paul Alivisatos et al., “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics”, Neuron, 74/6, 2012, p. 970-974.

36 For a summary of Napolis’s activities in this area, see Paul Bocij, Cyberstalking: Harassment in the Internet Age and How to Protect Your Family, Westport, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.

37 The People, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Diana Napolis, Defendant and Appellant, D041854, Court of Appeal of California, Fourth Appellate District, Division One 2003 Cal. App. Unpub. Lexis 9972, October 23, 2003.

38 Peter Cochrane, Tips for Time Travelers, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1999.

39 Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, “Homo Electricus and the Continued Speciation of Humans”, in Marian Quigley (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Information Ethics and Security, Hershey, Information Science Reference, 2007, p. 312-18.

40 “Connected”, Daily Telegraph, July 18, 1996.

41 Clive Crickmer, “Liven Up… Death Has Had Its Chips”, Daily Mail, July 18, 1996, p. 20.

42 Andrew Griffin, “Humans Will Become Hybrids by 2030, Says Leading Google Engineer, with Tiny Robots Scurrying around Our Brain to Help Us Think”, The Independent, June 4, 2015.

43 Institute of Creative Technologies website, http://ict.usc.edu.

44 Ibid.

45 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, New York, Random House, 2011.

Auteur

Jeffrey Sconce est professeur associé à la Northwestern University. Spécialiste de l’histoire culturelle des médias, il a publié Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000), et co-édité Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste Style, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2007). Auteur de nombreux articles consacrés à la question des cultures du contrôle, il vient de publier un ouvrage sur la psychose de l’emprise technologique sous le titre The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (Duke University Press, 2019).

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