The Net, the Unabomber and Jeffrey Epstein
Mk-Ultra
In 2003 premiered, Das Netz (“The Net”), a German documentary directed by Lutz Dammbeck and subtitled The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet, which tied the actions of Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, to cybernetics, John Brockman and Stewart Brand, pioneers of the counterculture movement that produced the modern personal computer. It would not be until 2019 that Brockman was exposed for his association with Jeffrey Epstein, along with other numerous pioneers of the computer industry, such as Marvin Minski and Bill Gates, with whom he shared an interest in the eugenic aspirations of Transhumanism.
Kaczynski’s disgust with the direction of the evolution of technology and mind control technologies came from his direct experience, beginning with his involvement in the MK-Ultra experiments of Henry A. Murray, an American psychologist at Harvard University, where he was an associate of Timothy Leary. Murray was a recruit to the sex-cult of his friend, the psychologist Carl Jung. In 1916, Murray married, aged 23, and after seven years of marriage, in 1923, he met and fell in love with Christiana Morgan. In a new Hebrew-language biography of Chaim Weizmann, Motti Golani and Jehuda Reinharz cite documents showing that in 1921 Christiana Morgan had a liaison with Weizmann.[1] In 1923, Morgan met and fell in love with Murray, then biochemist at Rockefeller University in New York. He was married 7 years, and did not want to leave his wife. As Murray experienced a serious conflict, Morgan advised him to visit Jung in 1927, and upon his advice they became lovers “to unlock their unconscious and their creativity.”[2]
During the period when Jung began composing his occult-themed Red Book, his lover Toni Wolff was a crucial figure in his life. Wolff published little under her own name, but helped Jung develop some of his best-known concepts, including anima, animus, and persona, as well as the theory of the psychological types. Her best-known paper is an essay on four “types” or aspects of the feminine psyche: the Amazon, the Mother, the Hetaira, and the Medial (or mediumistic) Woman.[3] Jung and Wolff believed they had founded a new religion, conceived through polygamy, which was reminiscent of Sabbatean antinomianism. According to Noll: “They believed in a new faith in which their former sins and evils became necessary for spiritual rebirth. God—no longer One—would emerge from individual visionary experiences and automatic writing as a multitude of natural forces or entities that were both good and evil.”[4]
Murray created a report commissioned in 1943 by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, titled “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler.” The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelinde Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke. The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Dr. Ernst Kris (1900 –1957) of the New School for Social Research, and Dr. Bertram D. Lewin (1896 – 1971) of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In Berlin in the 1920s, Lewin had a training analysis with Franz Alexander (1891 – 1964), a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology. Lewin published his first analytic article in 1930, followed by others on subjects ranging from diabetes and claustrophobia to the body as phallus. The main focus of his interest was manic states, which he saw as characterized by fleeting identifications with a multiple of outside figures.[5]
Murray saw psychology and the new social sciences as destined to make a contribution to a world that can live in peace and harmony. In a New World Order, with world laws, a world police force and world government, the USA, according to Murray:
…is the abstraction of ONE WORLD which we are on the verge of creating. The lot has fallen to the US to take over the direction of carrying out this last and difficult experiment: a global campaign of good against evil. By completely dedicating ourselves to the idea of a one world government, we will stir the hearts of all people on earth with the hope of a security that can counter any form of totalitarianism. The national citizen is obsolete, and must be transformed into a world citizen.[6]
From the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Murray was responsible for the ethically questionable, CIA-sponsored MK-Ultra experiments in which twenty-two undergraduates were used as guinea pigs. Among other purposes, Murray’s experiments focused on measuring people’s reaction under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks.[7] Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the vehicle used to cause high levels of stress and distress. Among them was 16-year-old Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later crimes. In 1993, Kaczynski carried out a bomb attack that injured a member of John Brockman’s network, computer scientists David Gelernter.
USCO
Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol
Stewart Brand, protege of Gregory Bateson
Brockman’s friend Stewart Brand spearheaded the movement that drew on the 1960s counterculture to present the “personal computer,” a term he coined, as a tool of personal empowerment. Another graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, like Mark Zuckerberg, Brand was deeply influenced by Marshall McLuhan, as well as cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, known for his designs of biospheres. First serving as a soldier in the US Army, Brand worked at the Pentagon as a photographer, and in 1961 he served in Vietnam. He studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College in 1962.
In 1963, based on their mutual interest, Brand contacted Kesey who invited him to join the Merry Pranksters, and is described in the beginning of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the course of his research, Brand lived with two different Indian tribes, the Oregon Silcots and the Navajos of the southwestern desert. Of the latter he has said, “Anything I know about organization, I learned at a Navajo peyote meeting one night.”[8] Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, featured a schizophrenic Indian chief Bromden who was from the same reservation where Brand had done some work, supposedly as a photo-journalist. Brand was inspired by Kesey’s book, where he thought the struggle between Bromden and the mental hospital was reflective of the one between the government and the Indian reservations.[9]
A group dances during the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, January 1966.
During his time with them, Brand produced the Trips Festival, involving rock music and light shows, which was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. According to Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven, Kesey and the Acid Tests, particularly the Trips Festival, were the catalyst of the cultural explosion at Haight-Ashbury, “which had been like throwing a switch that sent a surge of energy through the isolated pockets of hipness surrounding the Bay Area.”[10]
When Brand moved to New York, he hung out with members of the Beat scene, like Gerd Stern, who is considered a pioneer in the genre of multimedia art. Stern had known Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon, since the three of them had met when they were patients of the New York Psychiatric Institute in 1949, which was headed by Dr. Nolan D. C. Lewis, the Scottish Rite’s Field Representative of Research on Dementia Praecox.[11] Stern also collaborated with Marshall McLuhan, taught communications and media at Harvard University’s School of Education, and served as consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation arts program.[12]
Stern’s background in the Bay Area Beat community grew out of his involvement with Pacifica radio station, where he met Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts. Stern, Brand and other artists and engineers formed what was known as USCO, for “The Company of Us,” a media art collective which produced multimedia art internationally, which was most active in Woodstock, New York during the years 1964–66. Living not too far from the Millbrook Estate, they became involved with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner.[13] In 1965 USCO collaborated with Leary and Alpert’s Castalia Foundation, a precursor to the League for Spiritual Discovery, to reproduce the LSD experience in an “audio-olfactory-visual alteration of consciousness” psychedelic art event in New York City.[14]
USCO exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is considered a key link in the development of expanded cinema, visual music, installation art, and the Internet.[15] USCO were influenced by McLuhan, and used stroboscopes, projectors and audiotapes in their performances. Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian American filmmaker, poet, and artist tied to the Fluxus movement. Mekas, who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” presented a series of multimedia productions, under the title New Cinema Festival 1 (later referred to as the Expanded Film Festival), at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City. Mekas, was a close friend of Kenneth Anger, and a close collaborator with artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas. Other participants in the series included well-known and emerging figures such as Angus Maclise (with members of the Velvet Underground), Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol.
Gerd Stern and John Brockman
The Program Manager was John Brockman, a young producer associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, who could later become a famous literary agent as head of Brockman Inc., which represented science and technology writers. Brockman designed the promotional poster promoted the 1968 psychedelic comedy film about the Monkees, Head, written by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson and directed by Rafelson. The Monkees, the “prefab four,” who were created for a mid-1960s American television series, approached the project as a chance to disassociate themselves from the image that had created them.[16] In their well-known themesong they sing, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies.” Brockman would later achieve some infamy for his association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Stern and Michael Callahan co-founded Intermedia Systems Corporation in 1969, the year the company handled some management and administrative details for the Woodstock festival. Intermedia was a term used in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various inter-disciplinary art activities that occurred between genres in the 1960s. Gerd’s solo work and collaborative multi-media projects with USCO have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Museum, Vienna’s Kunsthalle, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Other career highlights included manager for Maya Angelou, writer for Playboy and producer of the Timothy Leary Psychedelic Theater.
Whole Earth Cagalogue
Stewart Brand published the final issue of the “Whole Earth Catalog” in 1971.
Gregory Bateson
As explained in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, the personal computer was in large part a product of the “computer liberation” movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s. Brand was a follower of Gregory Bateson and passionate about cybernetics, and spearheaded the movement that drew on the 1960s counterculture to present the “personal computer.” Most his generation, Brand recalled, rejected computers as tools of centralized control by a militarized superpower. It was through Brand’s efforts that the counterculture adopted the computer instead as a tool for personal liberation. The change of outlook was celebrated in an ode to cybernetics, titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” written by Richard Brautigan in 1967.
Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, 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.” Its first issue was devoted to cybernetics, starting with a review of Norbert Wiener’s 1948 inaugural book on the subject. According to John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, “The catalog ultimately helped shape the view of an entire generation, which came to believe that computing technologies could be used in the service of such goals as political revolution and safeguarding the environment.”[17]
As explained by Erik Davis in TechGnosis, “Bateson later bloomed into the quintessential California philosopher, a resident of Esalen and patron saint of the Whole Earth Catalog.” Brand explained, “What I found missing was any clear conceptual bonding of cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking,” and, “In the summer of ‘72, a book began to fill it in for me: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson.” [18] Steps, which was Bateson’s most influential book, was finished when he was at the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii in 1971, working with dolphins. Throughout his life, Bateson attributed great importance to his participation in the Macy conferences. “My debt,” he mentioned in the early seventies, “is evident in everything that I have written since World War II.”[19] Man and computer, according to Bateson, were part of a feedback loop, such that they were joined together in a single mental activity. This provided Bateson the opportunity to suggest that computers or machines were alive in the sense that they participated with humans in a pantheistic ecology, where the entire universe was divine, a perception of reality which was typically associated with LSD. As Bateson explained in Steps:
The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.[20]
In the 1972 when Brand was commissioned to write an article for Rolling Stone, he visited in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The resulting article, titled “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” provided a seminal influence, announcing, “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.” Brand added, “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” Brand has been credited with creating the computer hacker subculture as the direct result of the article.[21]
Brand filmed Engelbart’s demonstration of a mouse-based user interface was later dubbed “the Mother of All Demos.” The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, all tools that Engelbart believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals: multiple windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work).
Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In
Timothy Leary
Brand became one of the earliest “digerati” of the 1980s, having adopted Norbert Wiener’s idea that machines extended human potential. And it was Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog which managed to recruit the tech savvy among his fellow denizens of the 60s counterculture to interpret the rise of the personal computer and the Internet as tools of personal liberation from tyranny. Although these aspirations sound left-leaning, they were embedded in a libertarian strain that served to align the technology industry with neoliberal principles. Aligned with the pranksterism of Discordianism, and the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, the trend fueled the emerging hacker culture. The result is a disturbing political trend that swept Silicon Valley, which evolved into transhumanism and technolibertarianism.
Technolibertarianism, sometimes referred to as cyberlibertarianism, hailed the new “cybernetic frontier” that could be fortified against government intrusion through robust forms of encryption. The term Technolibertarianism was popularized in critical discourse by technology writer Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. It represents what English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as “The Californian Ideology” in a 1995 essay.
According to Fred Turner, sociologist Thomas Streeter of the University of Vermont, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, notes that the Californian Ideology appeared as part of a pattern of Romantic individualism with Stewart Brand as a key influence.[22] Turner describes their aspirations as follows:
…they would tear down hierarchies, undermine the sorts of corporations and governments that had spawned them, and, in the hierarchies’ place, create a peer-to-peer, collaborative society, interlinked by invisible currents of energy and information.
The development of the California Ideology was shaped by the presence of the Koch brothers in California, who had moved the CATO Institute from Wichita to San Francisco, alongside a handful of other Koch-funded libertarian organizations. In Menlo Park was Charles Koch’s flagship libertarian think-tank the Institute for Humane Studies, which he had taken control of in the 1960s. Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation, with David Koch as director, were headquartered in Santa Barbara. In 1979 the Libertarian Party, with funds from the Koch brothers, held its convention in Los Angeles, where the Koch-backed political party chose David Koch as its vice-presidential nominee for the 1980 race. SIL News reported that the earliest group of Libertarian Party activists consisted of 75 percent former Republicans, 36 percent Objectivists and 16 percent who embraced OTO member Robert Heinlein, 23 percent followers of Ludwig von Mises, and 17 percent anarchists.[23]
During the 1990s, members of the entrepreneurial class of Silicon Valley combined the ideas of Marshall McLuhan with elements of radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics, and used publications like Wired to promulgate their ideas. This ideology mixed New Left and New Right beliefs together based on their shared interest in anti-statism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and techno-utopianism. Wired was founded by Louis Rossetto, a “radical libertarian” also influenced by Ayn Rand, Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin. Rossetto, was inspired the Koch brothers’ Reason magazine when he was a student at Columbia in the early 1970s.[24] Rossetto and Stan Lehr, both young student radicals from Columbia University, associated with the Radical Libertarian Alliance journal the Abolitionist, wrote a cover story in January 1971 on the burgeoning libertarian movement for the New York Times Sunday magazine, with themselves photographed on the cover, called “The New Right Credo: Libertarianism.” “The movement is made!” Rothbard celebrated.[25]
Formerly known as Wired News or HotWired, the strongest influence on the Wired magazine’s editorial outlook came from the techno-utopianism of co-founder Stewart Brand and his long-time associate Kevin Kelly. Stewart Brand had hired Kelly in 1983 to edit later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review and Signal. With Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in 1985, one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. An early and very active member was Howard Rheingold, a former director of IONS who worked at Xerox PARC, and a founding executive editor of HotWired. Rheingold co-authored Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insight with Willis Harman. According to Rheingold’s book, the WELL’s Usenet feed was for years provided by Apple.
Adam Curtis connects the origins of the Californian Ideology to the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand.[26] Technolibertarianism is also known as extropianism, which was founded by Max More, who according to R.U. Sirius also coined the term transhumanism. According to Mark Dery in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Twentieth Century, “As theorized in Extropy, Extropian transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche—specifically, Rand’s conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche’s complementary concepts of the end of morality, the ‘will to power,’ and the Übermensch, or ‘overman’.”[27] More’s libertarianism is founded on his Luciferianism, as articulated in an article he wrote, “In Praise of the Devil”: “Lucifer perseveres in trying to point out to us that we have no reason to accept altruism. It is only freedom from the false-virtue of altruism that we gain freedom from God and ‘the State.’”[28]
The Californian Ideology, according to Barbrook and Cameron, “is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others.”[29] In the 1980s, Timothy Leary reemerged as a spokesperson of the “cyberdelic” counterculture, whose adherents called themselves “cyberpunks,” whose adherents were pioneers in the IT industry of Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, many young people became interested in Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of consciousness, because they felt that by reconciling spirituality with science and technology, it helped them to define the new techno-generation they were part of.[30] In contrast to the hippies of the 1960s who were decidedly anti-science and anti-technology, the cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s enthusiastically embraced technology and the hacker ethic. As Leary proclaimed, rebranding his popular commandment, “PC is the LSD of the 1990s” and admonished bohemians to “turn on, boot up, jack in.”[31]
Singularity
Ray Kurzweil, head of engineering at Google, and prophet of the Singularity
An important exponent of the transhumanist agenda is Ray Kurzweil, a head of engineering at Google, under whose stewardship the company, which normally subscribes to the dictum of “don’t do evil,” has recently broadened the scope of its business to cover the gamut of transhumanist interests, including artificial intelligence (AI) and even longevity. Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and the CIA-backed Palantir, says of himself, “I’m not like Ray Kurzweil where the singularity is near and all you have to do is sit back and eat the popcorn. It’s something that we have to choose to work on and we have to make it happen.”[32] Thiel also explained that he was taking human-growth hormone pills as part of his plan to live 120 years, and that he was interested in parabiosis, which includes the practice of getting transfusions of blood from a younger person, as a means of improving health and potentially reversing aging.[33]
Thiel is also on the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Founded in 2000, MIRI advocates ideas initially put forth by I. J. Good and Vernor Vinge regarding an “intelligence explosion,” or Singularity, yet another version of the End Times, which MIRI thinks may follow the creation of sufficiently advanced AI.[34] One of the directors of MIRI was Ray Kurzweil, a head of engineering at Google and the prophet of transhumanism. According to Kurzweil, once the Singularity has been reached, machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards, Kurzweil says, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe, effectively becoming God. In 2006, the MIRI, along with the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, the Center for Study of Language and Information, KurzweilAI.net, and Peter Thiel, co-sponsored the Singularity Summit at Stanford. The 2012 Singularity Summit was held at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, in San Francisco.[35]
Nick Bostrom, founder of Humanity+, formerly the World Transhumanist Association
A member of MIRI’s board of Research Advisors is Nick Bostrom, who is considered one of the founders of the transhumanist movement. In 1998, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), which has since changed its name to Humanity+. In 2004, he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bostrom was named in Foreign Policy’s 2009 list of top global thinkers “for accepting no limits on human potential.”[36] In the A History of Transhumanist Thought, Bostrom traces the history of transhumanism to alchemy, Francis Bacon and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Bostrom argues that if artificial intelligence can surpass that of humans, then this new superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth, which would mean an existential catastrophe for humans. In January 2015, he donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, an organization focused on challenges posed by advanced technologies.[37]
Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation
At Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011, from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Epstein; Bill Gates; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser.
Dr. Ben Goertzel renowned father of Artificial General Intelligence and CEO of SingularityNET
MIRI’s Director of Research was Humanity+ board member Ben Goertzel. With Belgian cyberneticist Francis Heylighen, Goertzel directs the transhumanist Global Brain Institute. Along with Marvin Minsky at MIT, Goertzel’s research has been backed by Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Established in 2000 by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the foundation funded Martin Nowak’s research at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, which studies the evolution of molecular biology with the use of mathematics. Nowak is the Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a type of updated eugenics, at Harvard. Epstein actively funded several universities and science institutes including the Santa Fe Institute, MIT and MIT’s Media Lab.
Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation held conferences at the luxury estate on Epstein’s private Caribbean island of Little St James, referred to as “Sin Island,” where Epstein is to have procured “sex slaves” for various high-powered personalities. Recent conferences have included topics such as gravity, language evolution and global threats to the Earth. Many notable scientists have attended the conferences, including Minsky, Gerard ‘t Hooft and Stephen Hawking.[38] John Brockman, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Katinka Matson, and Richard Dawkins flew to a TED conference in 2002 aboard Epstein’s plane.[39] Brockman is a literary agent and author who founded the Edge Foundation, an organization aimed to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Goleman and Jared Diamond. Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, who is referred to as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism,” along with Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.[40]
John Brockman, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett III, Katinka Matson and Richard Dawkins flying to a TED Conference in Moneterey California with Epstein
In 2019, Evgeny Morozov suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer fee. The Edge Organization Inc. is an online group of award-winning academics and authors in the sciences and social sciences.[41] Brockman had belonged in the 1960s to the New York multimedia scene around USCO, which involved John Cage, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol, and which had teamed up with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner.[42] It was Cage who introduced Brockman to Norbert Wiener’s book cybernetics. In the 1980s, Brockman became rich and famous as an agent for physicists, genetic scientists and computer scientists. In the 1990s, his publishing company, Brockman Inc., was the center of a global network of “digerati.” These included Heinz von Foerster, an architect of cybernetics and one of the members of the Macy conferences, as well as Gregory Bateson and Steward Brand. Referring to his network, Brockman explained, “no one in New York had a clue that there was something happening. That there was a consciousness or mindset that had evolved, and you could connect all these people.”[43]
John Brockman with Epstein recruiter Kelly Bovino (right) in photo from the Edge Foundation
Morozov proposed that Brockman may be the reason why so many prominent academics became associated with Epstein, like Marvin Minsky and Joi Ito. Along with John McCarthy, in the 1950s Minsky founded the AI Project at MIT, a forebearer of the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Epstein’s accuser Virginia Roberts Guiffre said she was told to have sex with former Minsky on Jeffrey Epstein’s island in the Virgin Islands when she was only seventeen.[44] Ito is the former director of the MIT Media Lab, and a former professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner. The Lab gained popularity since 1988, when Stewart Brand published The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T., and its work was regularly featured in technology journals in the 1990s. Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health and the The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019, following allegations of financial ties to Epstein. Ito admitted to taking $525,000 in funding from Epstein for the Lab, and permitting Epstein to invest $1.2 million in Ito’s investment funds.[45]
Jeffrey Epstein, founder of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation with computer science pioneer Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory
Sarah Kellen (right), one of Epstein’s victims turned recruiters, at John Brockman’s Edge dinners at TED, in 2002 & 2003.
Between 2001 and 2015, Edge Foundation received $638,000 from Epstein’s various foundations. In many of those years, Epstein was Edge’s sole donor.[46] In 2004, Brockman hosted a dinner at the Indian Summer restaurant in Monterey, Calif., where Mr. Epstein was introduced to scientists, including Seth Lloyd, the MIT physicist. Also at the Indian Summer dinner, according to an account on the website of Mr. Brockman’s Edge Foundation, were the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Jeff Bezos. Scientists gathered at dinner parties at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. Epstein attracted an illustrious list of scientists, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the MIT theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate.[47]
Bill Gates also began a regular friendship with Epstein after he had been convicted of sex crimes. Employees of Gates’s foundation also paid multiple visits to Epstein’s mansion. Melanie Walker, who had known Epstein since 1992 and worked as his science adviser, joined the Gates Foundation as senior program officer in 2006. Walker introduced Epstein to Boris Nikolic, an immunologist, biotech venture capitalist and former fellow at Harvard Medical School, who was the Gates Foundation’s science adviser, and the two men became friendly. Beginning in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions, including at least three times at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Gates emailed colleagues after his first get-together with Epstein, on January 31, 2011, when they were joined by Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden and her 15-year-old daughter. Gates commented by email: “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late.”[48]
Epstein and Eva dated for years before in 1994 she married the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, who was a friend and business associate of Epstein’s. Epstein told associates in 2014 that if he ever married, he would want it to be with Celina Dubin, Eva’s then 19-year-old daughter.[49] In 2019, unsealed documents revealed connections between Dubin and Jeffrey Epstein, including allegations of involvement in his sexual abuse ring. Rinaldo Rizzo, the former house manager for the Dubins, described a 2005 encounter at the Dubin’s home with a 15-year-old girl employed as a nanny. Rizzo said the girl, who was shaking and crying, told him that she was pressured by Ghislaine to have sex with Epstein, with Maxwell taking her passport when she refused.[50] A month after being hired, according to The Daily Beast, the Dubins took the girl with them to Sweden, where she was dropped off at an airport.[51] In 2012, Dubin and Eva signed The Giving Pledge, created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, which committed them to give away at least 50% of their wealth to charity within their lifetime.[52]
Around 2011, Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about creating the Global Health Investment Fund, a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund to provide “individual and institutional investors the opportunity to finance late-stage global health technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives in low-income countries.”[53] Also in that same year, attendees spotted Gates and Epstein engaged in private conversation at a TED conference in Long Beach, California. In 2013, Gates flew on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Fla., according to a flight manifest. As late as October 2014, Gates donated $2 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. University officials described the gift in internal emails as having been “directed” by Mr. Epstein.[54] Days before Epstein hanged himself in a Manhattan jail cell on August 10 2019, he amended his will and named Nikolic as a fallback executor.[55] After leaving the Gates Foundation in 2014, Nikolic funded more than a dozen firms in gene editing and other health technologies.[56]
Epstein established the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard which studies the evolution of microbiology and diseases through the use of mathematics. He was actively involved in the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, and also sits on the Mind, Brain & Behavior Advisory Committee at Harvard. The IAS is best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein and cybernetics founder John von Neumann. Established during the rise of European fascism, the IAS played a key role in the transfer of intellectual capital from Europe to America, and soon acquired a reputation of being at the pinnacle of academic and scientific life, a reputation it has retained.[57]
Epstein also expressed an interest in eugenics. Epstein often talked about perfecting the human genome, and conveyed his fascination with how certain traits were passed on, and how that could result in superior humans. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to seed the human race with his DNA by inseminating 20 chosen women with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, using his Sante Fe, New Mexico ranch as the “Ground Zero” for his community. According to the NASA scientist Jaron Lanier, a prolific author who is a founder of virtual reality, Epstein based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool. Epstein also expressed an interest in cryogenics. Epstein told an acquaintance that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.[58]
[1] עובד, הוצאת ספרים עם. "עם עובד - האב המייסד / מוטי גולני ויהודה ריינהרץ". www.am-oved.co.il (in Hebrew). Retrieved from https://www.am-oved.co.il/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%91_%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%93
[2] Michel Weber. “Christiana Morgan (1897–1967).” in Michel Weber & William Desmond, Jr. (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought (Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2008), v. II, pp. 465–468.
[3] Toni Wolff. Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1956).
[4] Noll. The Aryan Christ, p. 94.
[5] Otto Fenichel. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 408.
[6] Cited in The Net, the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet, documentary by Lutz Dammbeck (2003). Retrieved from http://uselesseaterblog.blogspot.ca/2012/04/net-unabomber-lsd-and-internet-study.html
[7] Alston Chase. Harvard and the Unabomber The Education of an American Terrorist. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). pp. 18–19.
[8] Rolling Stone, (December 13, 1969).
[9] Lutz Dammbecks. The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003 documentary)
[10] Stevens. Storming Heaven, p. 237.
[11] “Interview with Beat Poet and Multi-media Artist Gerd Stern” The Allen Ginsberg Project: Gerd Stern – 1. Retrieved from http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.ca/2014/10/gerd-stern-1.html
[12] Gerd Stern. “The IMC Lab Gallery” [http://www.theimclab.com/artists/GerdStern#.VXhLUuegL-t]
[13] Gerd Stern. “Oral History: From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978.” The Bancroft Library, 2001. p. 83.
[14] Jennifer Ulrich. “Transmissions from The Timothy Leary Papers: Evolution of the ‘Psychedelic" Show’” New York Public Library (June 4, 2012).
[15] Michel Oren. “USCO: Getting Out of Your Head to Use Your Head.” Art Journal, Winter 2010.
[16] John Brockton. “About the HEAD Poster.” Edge (November 6, 2018).
[17] John Markoff. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005).
[18] Thomas Rid. The Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).
[19] Ibid.
[20] Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 467.
[21] Nevill Drury. “Magic and Cyberspace: Fusing Technology and Magical Consciousness in the Modern World” Esoterica. IV (2002) p. 99.
[22] Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University Of Chicago Press, 2006) p. 285.
[23] Ibid., p. 391.
[24] Mark Ames. “Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: The tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference is a cesspool.” Pando (July 8, 2014).
[25] Brian Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition), p. 369.
[26] Adam Curtis. “Love and Power.” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC, 2011).
[27] Mark Dery. Escape Velocity.
[28] “In Praise of the Devil.” Lucifer.com.
[29] Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Vol 1, No. 3 - CODE (1 September 1995).
[30] stephinrazin. “Timothy Leary: Psychedelics to Internet.” Retrieved from http://www.docstoc.com/docs/39010334/21065137-Timothy-Leary-Psychedelics-to-Internet
[31] Timothy Leary, Michael Horowitz & Vicky Marshall. Chaos and Cyber Culture. (Ronin Publishing, 1994).
[32] Cadwalladr. “Peter Thiel,” p. 8.
[33] Maya Kosoff. “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself With Young People’s Blood.” Vanity Fair (August 1, 2016).
[34] Eliezer Yudkowsky (2013). Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics. Technical report 2013-1 (Berkeley, CA: Machine Intelligence Research Institute). Retrieved from https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf
[35] “Singularity Summit: Logistics.” SingularitySummit.com.
[36] “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers – 73. Nick Bostrom.” Foreign Policy (December 2009).
[37] Danielle Muoio. “Elon Musk just announced a new artificial intelligence research company.” Tech Insider (December 11, 2015).
[38] “Stephen Hawking pictured on Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Island of Sin’”. The Daily Telegraph (January 12, 2015).
[39] Brock Colyar, Kelsey Hurwitz, Charlotte Klein, Ezekiel Kweku, Amy Larocca, Yinka Martins, Adam K. Raymond, Matthew Schneier, Matt Stieb & James D. Walsh. “Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling? A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York.” New York (July 22, 2019). Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-high-society-contacts.html
[40] “Preview: The Four Horsemen of New Atheism reunited.” New Statesman (December 22, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/richard-dawkins-issue-hitchens
[41] “Jeffrey Epstein Science: Founder.” jeffreyepsteinscience.com (January 13, 2015).
[42] Gerd Stern. “Oral History: From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978.” The Bancroft Library, 2001. p. 83.
[43] Lutz Dammbecks. The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003 documentary)
[44] Khari Johnson. “AI luminary Marvin Minsky allegedly had sex with trafficking victim on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.” Venture Beat (August 9, 2019).
[45] Margaret Sullivan. “Joi Ito should be fired from MIT's Media Lab after taking funding from felon Jeffrey Epstein.” The Washington Post (September 6, 2019).
[46] Evgeny Morozov. “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.” The New Republic (August 22, 2019). Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-intellectual-enabler
[47] James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein & Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” New York Times (July 31, 2019).
[48] Emily Flitter & James B. Stewart. “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past.” New York Times (October 12, 2019).
[49] Nancy Dillon. “Jeffrey Epstein reportedly wanted to marry ex-girlfriend’s teen daughter, a scheme the girl knew nothing about, source says.” Daily News (December 18, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-jeffrey-epstein-wanted-to-marry-ex-girlfriend-teen-daughter-report-20191218-x3qqp5melnguznkuorwfiohj5a-story.html
[50] Julie K.Brown & Sarah Blaskey. “Huge cache of records details how Jeffrey Epstein and madam lured girls into depraved world.” Miami Herald (August 9, 2019).
[51] Kate Briquelet & Michael Daly. “NYC Power Couple’s Butler Says Swedish Teen Told Him of Epstein Island Horrors.” The Daily Beast (August 19, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-scandal-butler-for-glenn-and-eva-dubin-says-swedish-teen-told-him-she-was-pressured-for-sex
[52] Carol Loomis & Miguel Helft. “The Total Number of Members, Many Signing Jointly With Their Spouses, Has Reached 81.” Fortune (April 19, 2012). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20120704145745/http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/19/buffett
[53] Emily Flitter & James B. Stewart. “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past.” New York Times (October 12, 2019).
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Neil Weinberg. “Epstein’s 11th-Hour Executor Says He Won’t Serve for Estate.” Bloomberg (August 19, 2019).
[57] Matthew Reisz. “The perfect brainstorm.” Times Higher Education (March 20, 2008).
[58] James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein & Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” New York Times (July 31, 2019).