Futurecop 2025: the BRAIN Initiative

UPDATED Anti-development of this article now gone « stable », with added links and 9% less suck!

« In the future, corporate cybernetic Neonazi zombies control your brains with photonic guns… » (from back cover of ’80s VHS box)

You can laugh it up for a while, but do not let yourselves be confused by this cheesy self-sarcastic onset. This report is actually about a dead-serious live science-horror show unfolding under our very noses.

Let’s begin with a statement of an implicit sociological consensus: as opposed to what many persist in believing hard, social control is no exact science and has never been; and the State is not almighty, even with all the schizophrenic State borders, property laws, roads, cops and prisons. Any graduate in social sciences will admit it, but we’ll save you from 30 000 – 100 000 $ in tuition fees to understand that. Though, since we live in crazy times where Malthusian determinists still run the show of science and finance and also the corporate governments, some people within the capitalist techno-industrial establishment are about to attempt to change that… Through technology.

The State is now on its way to launch a new level of offensive against the human mind, under the guise of developping effective new treatments for several mental disorders and dysfunctions.

Just to spook you up a bit, let’s read it from the official words of the US government:

In  the  last  decade,  scientists  have  made  a  number  of  landmark  discoveries  that  now  create  the opportunity  to  unlock  the  mysteries  of  the  brain  —  including  the  sequencing  of  the  human genome,  the  development  of  new  tools  for  mapping  neuronal  connections,  the  increasing resolution  of  imaging  technologies,  the  maturation  of  nanoscience,  and  the  rise  of  biological engineering.

These  breakthroughs  have  paved  the  way  for  unprecedented  collaboration  and  discovery  across scientific  fields.  For  instance,  by  combining  advanced  genetic  and  optical  techniques,  scientists can  now  use  pulses  of  light  to  determine  how  specific  cell  activities  in  the  brain  affect  behavior. Similarly,  through  the  integration  of  neuroscience  and  physics,  researchers  can  now  use high-resolution  imaging  technologies  to  observe  how  the  brain  is  structurally  and  functionally connected  in  living  humans. While  these  technological  innovations  have  contributed  substantially  to  our  expanding knowledge  of  the  brain,  significant  breakthroughs  in  how  we  treat  neurological  and  psychiatric disease  will  require  a  new  generation  of  tools  to  enable  researchers  to  record  signals  from  brain cells  in  much  greater  numbers  and  at  even  faster  speeds.  That’s  where  the  BRAIN  Initiative comes  in.

Some White House crazies

Even if we’ll refrain from falling in the easy trap of doom porn, this is a major aggressive new expansion into people’s minds by attempting to map with such precision and exhaustivity anything that lies down our neural networks and their interactions, and to exploit existent and developping « cool tech » to fuck shit up at a fundamental level of brain activity. As any mapping or even surveying in the context of colonial expansion, it isn’t just made for the textbooks; it is first and foremost to invade a space, and conquering it.

(…) the  results  of  the  new  research  will  be profound,  from  unlocking  the  central  mysteries  of  brain  function  to harnessing  brain  computational  strategies  for  humanity’s  technological purposes.  He  also  noted  the  importance  of  the  BRAIN  Initiative combining  existing  technology  and  science,  listing  a  series  of  advances that  will  have  applications  in  future  applied  research.

– Wireless  technologies  will  enable  non-invasive  monitoring, measurement,  and  control.
– Miniaturized  cameras,  microscopes,  fiber  optics,  sensors,  and  other advances  in  the  photonics  industry  will  enable  systems  to  collect and  transmit  data  at  higher  speeds.
– Algorithms  developed  for  use  in  military  defense  and counterintelligence  surveillance  will  enable  scientists  to  track  small organisms.
– Adaptive  imaging  and  robotics  will  give  scientists  new  tools  for precise  observation.
– Computation  and  machine-learning  that  has  been  applied  towards consumer  behavior  may  help  scientists  to  understand  brain  behavior and  disorders.

From « BRAIN Initiative launches moonshot… » Alan Howard

So after enforcing upon the masses technologies that alienate, disrupt, destabilize, dumb down and especially intoxicate people’s abilities to think for themselves and have an imaginary of their own, and doing it all in near-perfect impunity, quite far in the backstore away from the police lines and telescreens; they’re coming up with an all-encompassing solution against the very problems they’ve created.There’s no need to shut us up when our minds are being shut from inside, or criminalize thinking when they make us think however they want us to. Eventually the political need for media propaganda, pigs, prisons, CCTVs would become void, or only extremely marginal… but this won’t be neither an anarchy, on the contrary this would be an even deeper totalitarian rule.

« Our goal?  To  produce  the  first  dynamic  view  of  the  human  brain  in  action, revealing  how  its  roughly  86  billion  neurons  and  its  trillions  of connections  interact  in  real  time. »

« When  on  May  25,  1961,  President  Kennedy  announced  plans  to go  to  the  moon  by  the  end  of  the  decade,  most  Americans  (not  to mention  space  Nazi scientists!)  were  stunned  because  much  of  the technology  needed  to  achieve  a  moonshot  didn’t  yet  exist. (…) Right  now,  we’re pretty  good  at  studying  individual  brain  cells  and  we  also  are  able to  image  the  whole  brain  when  someone  is  holding  very  still inside  a  neuroimaging  machine  (such  as  a  PET  or  MRI  scanner). What’s  missing  are  tools  to  see  what’s  really  going  on  within  the brain’s  neural  circuitry  —  the  crucial  middle  level  at  which  most  of human  cognition  and  behavior  is  generated,  as  well  as  ways  to look  at  the  brain  when  people  are  moving  around  and  interacting in  the real  world.  »

– from Dr. Francis Collins, James Bond villain turned State-sponsored Mad Scientist from the US National Institute of Health

If you’re looking at the prevailing idiocy in happy servitude that people in general have been demonstrating lately, withstanding, outlasting and reaffirming against these social and personal uprisings that have been occuring all over the place on the planet, it so appears that a major part of our insurgencies and militancies may have lost one or two major rounds. They’ve been buying into social media like cattle waiting in line for the abattoir, like ants walking headfirst into a huge bonfire that smells like honeypots. Anarchists and radicals have been now putting their militancy on it just like, as Marx Suckerberg coined it, « dumb fucks ». So what do you think will happen next, in terms of technocratic funnels of social control?

As there’s been some really intense fighting on several fronts, including the one of techno-industrial development, against the « fat cats » and their rats in their projects to gain always more power. So it is claimed, the elite’s hands might have been trembling at our collective insurgencies, and as well in the face of an Internet gone wild, that both represented a clear and serious threat to the monopoly that the fascistic factions of the establishment used to claim over culture, information and extra-personal communications. As it’s been argued in recent articles and books by the liberal intellectuals and recuperators in the West, the information war and its related real-life uprisings may have caused a few drawbacks in the plans of the global financial Nazis. Wishful thinking, most probably, reflecting a poverty of analysis of the authoritarian undercurrents of the mass social relationship.

But world-class parasites can now calm down and comfort themselves on their huge yatchs and posh hotels… as some corporate mad scientists, in collaboration with Global Emperor Obama and his gang of buddies, have found a golden solution to insure that, for the next decades, perhaps centuries, that measly discomforting dissent coming from many parts of the « low-lives » will be shut down. Once and for all.

So what is this glorious plan?

To conquer the human brain. Down to the tiniest ramifications of our neural networks.

The White House has even made the paradigmatic relationship quite clear: they want to launch a conquest of the human brain in the same way as they’ve launched a conquest of the Moon in the ’60s. As usual, such imperialist science will also once again a trail of abused, genetically-modified non-human test subjects on its toxic trail, before you get to see human victims of genetic abuse as well.

They’re also big fans of macho freudian sexual subtext…

The mouse  walked,  the  mouse stopped; the mouse ignored a bowl of food, then scampered back  and  gobbled it up,  and  it was all  controlled  by neuroscientists, researchers reported…
« Obama’s BRAIN Initiative yields first study results », Reuters

To understand such development, it’s better to go back in the history of American psychology. More specifically behavioral psychology. This field of psychology is by far the most deterministic and reductive to all living beings, though it remained active in parts due to its efficiency at solving some pathologically addictive behaviors in people, and to facilitate domestication of pets through Pavlov’s well-known « classic conditionning ». Both this method and the more elaborate « operant conditionning » can be understood as a primitive neurolinguistic form of behavior modification by external control agents, through the association with positive or negative representations of stimuli, where in fact the stimuli is symbolically integrated through the cognitive and psycho-affective systems of thought, turned into symbols with conscious and subconscious meanings. The film Clockwork Orange makes a very clear depiction yet (presumably) fictional example of such therapy.

But this field has always been limited in efficiency to specific patterns of behavior, also to facilitate learning to some extent. In several sectors of the industry there are still widely-spread attempts at making workers more productive and subservient by exploiting the patterns of reward for a surplus of work, though this, too, isn’t an exact science with thin or non-existent error margins. Not everyone works overtime or snitches on co-workers just to get candies suspended over their heads. The complexity and relative diversity of people’s experience, culture, consciousness, feelings, desires and imagination obviously makes behaviorism a rather brutish understanding of human behavior.

In order to change a person’s deeper cognition and perception of stimuli, more at the endocrinian levels of consciousness and also subconsciousness, more elaborate methods and approach have to be used, which may involve the use of psychotronic drugs and/or neuro-electrotherapy. The research and development to that effect is controversial and delving in historical uncertainties. The Nazi regime had first conducted drug-induced experiments on deep modification of mind patterns -obviously with the end of being used for social control- and some of this have been continued under the secret MKULTRA program in the ’50s-’60s, due to the well-documented integration of Nazi officers and scientists to the CIA and American scientific establishment. More mainstream and overt neurolinguistics approaches have been used in education and language learning, to facilitate the integration of knowledge, though it has been so to limited extents.

The deterministic theory of neuroscience and its highly-profitable advances through pharmacology in the field of psychiatry might have changed the game. Today, neuro-pharmaceuticals aren’t only used to « treat » (or rather accentuate) mental disorders, but also to enhance the fledging abilities of the elder, sooth the temper of children deemed as « hyperactive » (through Ritalin, a drug developped by a Nazi big pharma corp, Sardoz/Novartis), exacerbate or attenuate sexual drive, regulate sleep disorders, and even improve intellectual skills. That, leaving aside all the more traditional legal and illegal drugs like weed, coffee, sugar, alcohol and crack-cocaine. « Soma », the sedative used massively in the novel « Brave New World », is already all over the place. But there’s a next step down the rabbit hole…

Neuroscientists  have  made progress  in understanding how  individuals brain  cells and molecules work, as  well  as imaging patterns  of whole brain activity,  but the BRAIN  Initiative  aims to  fill the gap in  knowledge of what goes on  in the middle,  at  the  level of neural circuits.  To do this, the initiative seeks to  develop  new tools,  such  as optogenetics, which allow  scientists to manipulate brain cells  using light. The Obama Administration is  very committed  to this grand challenge, the President’s  Science Advisor John  Holdren  said in  a  news conference  Tuesday at the  White House. « We have a long way  to  go  to  understand how  the human brain functions at the  speed of thought, » Holdren said.  Neuroscientists  will need a new generation of  tools  and  technologies, and the ability to record signals from a much  greater number  of brain  cells  at vastly  greater speeds,  he added.

Companies  such as Google and  General Electric,  and  members  of  the  National  Photonics  Initiative, are partnering  with the BRAIN  Initiative by investing  $30  million  in funding, as well as  providing equipment and expertise, White House  officials announced. In addition, foundations such  as the Simons Foundation  in New York City, and  universities  such as Carnegie Mellon University  in  Pittsburgh  are  aligning  more than $240  million  of their existing research efforts with  the  BRAIN Initiative,  officials said. The initiative,  whose founding  members include the  National Institutes  of Health  (NIH), the National Science  Foundation  (NSF) and  the Defense  Advanced  Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will also grow  to include the Food  and Drug  Administration  (FDA) and the Intelligence Advanced  Research Projects  Activity  (IARPA).
– From Google is the East India Company of the US techno-empire

The technique(s) under research and development will, if we read it right in the official infos, be representing a relative shift away from the toxic pharmacological therapies on the brain, to a much more comprehensive approach relying on photoelectric (or photogenetic) manipulation, where the interaction between induced light and the bioelectric patterns of the brain’s neural networks in concerned. While electrotherapy (not to be confused with the barbaric, destructive shock therapy, still in use in some places) appears to be a positive path to take for medicine, as an eventual alternative to the nefarious substances given massively to people then rejected in the environment as bioaccumulating toxis industrial waste, it should be first applied on anything not related to the central nervous system, like for healing injuries and infections much more efficiently, or not used by a class of people with obvious political interests that go against everybody but their own kind.

For an instance, there’s a still yet unconfirmed hypothesis out there, advanced by Dr. Robert Becker, that electrotherapy would have the potential of making cut-off limbs grow back to their former condition (by stimulating the differentiation of cells during healing, between flesh and bone), and devastating virii like flesh-eating bacteria to be killed on-the-spot. On the other hand, the potential for directly modifying and/or directly controlling a person’s brain « circuitry » through photonic or electric stimuli means turning people merely into remote-controlled robots made of flesh and bone. The eerie experiments of Jose Delgado were quite revealing to that regards, but these were just crude, exploratory first steps of what they are now going deep into.

Projects  funded  under  BRAIN  seek  to  combine  landmark  discoveries like  the  sequencing  of  the  humane  genome  with  new  tools  for  mapping neuronal  connections,  nanoscience,  and  biomechanical  engineering  in collaborative  environments,  said  John  Holdren,  the  director of the White  House  Office  of  Science  and  Technology  Policy.  New  photonic capabilities  enable  researchers  to  use  pulses  of  light  to  see  how  cells affect  behavior,  applying  neuroscience  and  physics  to  see  how  the brain  is  connected. This  will  go  a  long  way  to  getting  a  full,  clear  picture of  how  the  brain  functions  at  the  speed  of  thought,  said  Holdren, leading  to  the  treatment  of  disease  and  better  learning  outcomes.  Like Dr.  Collins,  he  highlighted  the  lack  of  available  and  effective  tools  to study  the  brain  in  action  as  a  key  barrier  to  scientists  measuring  neural circuits  in  real  time
« BRAIN Initiative launches moonshot… » Techrepublic

For the optogenetic side of this, unlike with the electrotherapy approach, the means to apply such techniques to the masses are, if you notice, already massively-available. There was already also a social context of robotization of the masses… Tons of people have been confessing themselves to Facebook and receiving commands from Twitter at least as much as Christian believers used to be into the Church… Workers are still working more enthusiastically than ever to their collective doom on the daily altar of the society of commodity and its spectacle.

There is an ongoing background of research and development that’s only hinted at through the promotional reports quoted here, that clearly connects the dots between the neurons of the mad scientists, their animal test subjects neurons, and their upcoming human target population, that, just as reported, amazingly ties together genetics, photonics, nanoscience, neurology, pharmacology and neuropsychiatry.

Brain reward systems play a central role in the cognitive and hedonic behaviors of mammals. Multiple neuron types and brain regions are involved in reward processing, posing fascinating scientific questions, and major experimental challenges. Using diverse approaches including genetics, electrophysiology, imaging, and behavioral analysis, a large body of research has focused on both normal functioning of the reward circuitry and on its potential significance in neuropsychiatric diseases. (…)

The advent of microbial and engineered opsins has enabled cell-type-specific, millisecond-scale modulation of electrical and biochemical neural activity patterns in heterogeneous brain tissue in vivo. Electrical excitation and inhibition of genetically defined neurons can be achieved using channelrhodopsins and halorhodopsins, respectively, whereas intracellular biochemical signaling can be optically controlled using engineered optoXRs (opsin-receptor chimeras). (…)

Together the methods, tools, and technologies we have developed and described here and in our related articles (see Microbial Opsins: A Family of Single-Component Tools for Optical Control of Neural Activity [Yizhar et al. 2011] and Optogenetics: Opsins and Optical Interfaces in Neuroscience [Adamantidis et al. 2014a]) allow millisecond-scale optical control and quantitative validation of activity within well-defined neurons in freely moving mammals (as illustrated here for optogenetic modulation of DA neurons). The intrinsic generalizability of these methods delivers the broad and versatile capability to assess the causal role of well-defined electrical and biochemical signals, in specific cell types, in mammalian circuit physiology.

– « Optogenetics in Freely-Moving Mammals », from scientific boneheads Feng Zhang and Antoine Adamanditis

Plugging fiber optic cables straight into the heads of genetically-engineered mice… only to prove how efficiently humans can be equally mind-controlled through similar optogenetics approaches. How brilliant. Such Little Eichmanns could be enjoying a quiet life in your close neighborhood… Beware.

Optogenetics  with  microbial  opsin  genes  has  enabled  high-speed  control  of genetically  specified  cell  populations  in  intact  tissue.  However,  it  remains  a challenge  to  independently  control  subsets  of  cells  within  the  genetically targeted  population.  Although  spatially  precise  excitation  of  target  molecules can  be  achieved  using  two-photon  laser-scanning  microscopy  (TPLSM) hardware,  the  integration  of  two-photon  excitation  with  optogenetics  has thus  far  required  specialized  equipment  or  scanning  and  has  not  yet  been widely  adopted.  Here  we  take  a  complementary  approach,  developing  opsins with  custom  kinetic,  expression  and  spectral  properties  uniquely  suited  to scan  times  typical  of  the  raster  approach  that  is  ubiquitous  in  TPLSM laboratories.

We  use  a  range  of  culture,  slice  and  mammalian in  vivo preparations  to  demonstrate  the  versatility  of  this  toolbox,  and  we quantitatively  map  parameter  space  for  fast  excitation,  inhibition  and  bistable control. Together these advances may help enable broad adoption ofintegrated optogenetic and TPLSM technologies across experimental fields and systems.

– From Two-photon  optogenetic  toolbox  for  fast inhibition,  excitation  and  bistable modulation (PDF), by Mark Schnitzer and his other gang of scientific boneheads

So sweet…

Also staying consistent with this historical intimate relationship between the parallel developments of neuropsychology and computer science since the ’50s, are the new developments in the field of photonics applied to artifical neural networks for future computers; which, according to Dr. Collins claims at least, is one of the new tech tools comprised within the BRAIN initiative, allowing for a nano-surveillance and nano-management of the neural networks much beyond what previous science could dream of.

After  developing  a  single  photonic  neuron  in 2009 ,  the  research  team  has  been working  to  build  sophisticated,  ultrafast  signal  processing  circuits  that  mimic  the visual,  auditory,  and  motor  functions  found  in  biological  organisms.

Their  initial  implementation  was  inspired  by  the  crayfish  tailflip  response–a  natural wonder  of  high-speed  sensing. Crayfish  have  a  neuronal  circuit  in  their  brain  that  is  networked  in  such  a  way  that,  if it  senses  danger,  a  specific  set  of  neurons  fire  simultaneously,  causing  the  creature  to f lip  its  tail  to  swim  away  with  amazing  speed.

With  this  biological  model  in  mind,  Prucnal  and  his  team  designed  a  system  that  uses several  excitable  lasers,  pre-loaded  in  such  a  way  that  if  a  particular  signal  comes  in, the  lasers  recognize  the  specific  pattern  and  fire  a  spike  together.

In  the  future,  the  researchers  say  such  a  device  could  be  capable  of  making  nearly instantaneous  calculations  in  life-or-death  situations,  such  as  deciding  whether  to eject  a  fighter  pilot  from  a  jet.  »

When  thousands  of  photonic  neurons  are  networked  together  and  working  in  unison, we  believe  we  can  build  a  processor  that  can  sense  patterns  and  cues  with  an  almost human-like  quality,  but  a  billion  times  faster, »  said  Bhavin  Shastri,  a  post-doctoral fellow  at  Princeton  working  on  the  project.

For  example,  the  team  imagines  being  able  to  peer  into  all  the  wireless  signals  around you,  lock  onto  one  of  interest,  and  take  action  on  it–all  in  an  instant  as  the  signal zooms  across  your  antenna…

– « Innovations from the Wild World of Optics and Photonics », from the National-Socialist Foundation

Coooool, Big Brother…  Cool.

Therefore, aren’t the telescreens most of us carry so close to them -often closer than their lovers or children- spread all over the place already a soft form of photogenetic disruption, still not used to its full extent by the technocratic managers? Go see why is Google, with its army of tablets with really neat screens and software, is involved. This is exactly why and how this new development in neuroscience is becoming dangerous, for all. There’s an excuse here for DARPA’s involvement to be justified on the surface by their willingness to cure their workers and ex-workers from the PTSDs and paranoid-schizophrenic disorders. Of course we have to believe in that, after decades of veterans being left on their own. The legitimation they’re presenting us with upfront has always got to be Occam’s Razor, so we have to believe it. It’s a few more millions worth argument for their investors.

There is also a more acceptable argument of technological reformism, beyond the usual techno-salvation. Of bringing a new dimension of technologies that are much less harmful to human health than the previous, terrible, hardly-efficient false solutions. Especially the pharmaceuticals. Would Pfizer, Bayer and Novartis agree to cope with abandoning their multi-billion markets just because their very associates from the government health adminstrations have decided to shift to photonic therapies? Dubious. Would highly-controversial organizations like Google, DARPA and IARPA be so interested in this develpment if it’s really just to cure elders suffering from Alzheimer and a few younger people having psychotic mental troubles? Would there be this line of argument about some broad « societal needs », and the forming and deployment of a new workforce if such? There appears to be much added value here.

Still, we have a a slight probability that the people promoting this may just be what they appear to be… educated liberal reformists from the academic/scientific community who worked out compromises with nefarious government and corporate organizations in order to launch a process of healthier, cleaner, « greener » (as far as neurological environment is concerned, as well as the waters and soil that’ve been contaminated by pharmaceuticals for decades) therapies to cure brain diseases. Unfortunately, given the elitist development process of these technologies, we, as the « low lives » who don’t have access to the tools, knowledge, social status, professional privileges, are collectively faced with once again waiting for History to confirm or infirm another optimistic theory of scientific progress.

Faced, but not irrevocably forced. Especially not when they’re still at the starting curve of this R & D process.

So before all this is allowed to happen, so that there is an accurate knowledge of which complex of neurons must be stimulated so to have a desired effect, the brain’s internal universe has to be mapped. Then points of references have to be marked in this topography, lines of enforcement has to be drawn, so that multidimensional microcosms of brain patterns can be shaped, changed, exploited or dismantled. Perhaps even created from scratch. So neural netwoks must be identifed and classified accordingly with their patterns of activities, fields of action and interests, specific responses to stimuli, just like how we’ve been spying on insurgent groups and networks. We can easily predict that this WILL result in an even more unquestioned deterministic doctrine on the human brain than the past biology and related biochemical « solutions » have been preaching to the masses, due to the incredible new levels of accuracy and exhaustivity that their techniques possess.

Emerging micro- and nanofabrication techniques could be used to create smaller chips bearing smaller electrical and even chemical probes that would be less invasive. Nanoprobes bearing several dozen electrodes, for instance, could be stacked to probe hundreds of thousands of recording sites and transmit data wirelessly.

Alternatively, nanoparticles carrying molecules that bring them to specific cell types could lodge in cell membranes so surgical placement wouldn’t be necessary. The nanoparticles could also carry molecules that can sense electrical activity, pressure, or even certain chemicals revealing brain activity.

Novel optical techniques could also aid the mapping project. When a neuron fires, the amount of calcium inside cells increases, so many research groups use calcium-sensitive fluorescent dyes to study neuron activity. But this measurement is once removed from the actual electrical activity of the neuron. A voltage-sensitive fluorescent molecule or other imaging agent could provide a more accurate view of activity.

Synthetic biology could be another useful tool. Enzymes that build strands of DNA are sensitive to ion concentration and will introduce more errors into their DNA production in the presence of calcium. As such, these enzymes could be used as sensors for neuron activity. A predetermined DNA sequence could be implanted into neurons and, as it is copied, the resulting strand of DNA would provide a record of the patterns of errors corresponding to patterns of neuron activity. Error-spotted strands from different neurons could later be sequenced.

Researchers sketched out a rough roadmap for the project in a 2012 proposal. The initiative will most likely start with the development of improved calcium-imaging methods for recording neuron firing, followed by voltage-imaging of neuron activity. Since these two methods would look only at surface structures (because light cannot travel far into brain tissue), the third step could be the development (and deployment!?) of large arrays of nanoprobes.

– Future cops inside your brains, how will they work and why they matter, by some other Neonazi scientist

Then we can look at the vulnerabilities, activities, dysfunctions, routines, structures… then zap. We can take over, and ideally modulate, bend it to « our » needs… pacifying it, making it docile and positively servile. Not just positively servile, but intentionally… desperately… hardcore servile. Servile like a religious believer. Enough to build mountainside towns out of huge rocks and temples/cathedral far beyond human proportions. Also fairly enough to send neighbors, friends, family members and lovers to death camps, not against their hearts and out of fear like some of people did under the Nazi’s conquered lands, but with a smile of satisfaction, of having served a « good cause », or the terrible « community ».

This is also how colonial invasion works.

For a parabole… Native people on Turtle Island haven’t only been raided and killed for centuries… they’ve been also watched, examined by clergy then by bureaucrats and anthropologists, they’ve been intoxicated by alcohol and infected blankets, robbed by commercial « trade » and land property laws, they’ve been fucked up through corruption schemes by politicians, bought up through the Indian Act and the Ministry of Indian Affairs. We have seen a few instances of Native people in North America being more enthusiastic, willful collaborators with authorities than most settlers we’ve seen… with such counter-dissentive or reactionary attitudes that would make even cops estranged.

So let’s accept that they no longer give a damn about the lay people’s favorable opinions on such new technologies of « comprehensive » management of the mind. Obviously most people are likely to find this stuff sickening to a point of -as a matter of fact- losing their minds; but the true power over these techno-scientific developments is happening much beyond the reach of their (already dehumanizingly boring) prescribed legal political courses of action. You all understand, we guess, that there’s no reason to give a fuck about any democratic perspective, not more than they have. There is no nano-scale democracy and there simply can’t be. Their politics consist in a private, corporate process of power-accumulation that’s got the ridiculous old mirage of « civil society » in their pockets from the start, to puppet with accordingly with the spectacular needs of the moment, as they might unfold, which is probably the best reason why activist-related NGOs and nonprofits still exist. All what they care about, for the rest of us, is that we’re going to swallow their pill and come to terms with their final utopia.

And we’re saying « final » here for a purpose. Because if they really « make it to the Moon »… if they really succeed, as planned, to develop ways to efficiently and accurately scan, map, shape, manipulate, manage and control our brain activity directly, this very well might be the end for that revolutionary potential of the « proles » -especially the individual- at any sort of dissent, anarchy, disobedience, resistance, uncivility, creativity, free will and simple critical thinking and action. It won’t matter anymore who you’ve been reading from, as the managers will be able to restructure your thought patterns in a way that these ideas will be -if not completely forgotten- rendered as pointless and insignificant psychic paradoxes in relation to how you’re thinking and acting. And of course, as in every mad scientist’s project, this may have unforeseen consequences that even ourselves can’t really look forward to. BUT, as usual, we are expected to trust them in whatever are their claims of healing the sick and « saving lives ».

The  goal  of  BRAIN  Initiative  Public-Private  Partnership  Program  is  to  facilitate  partnerships  between  clinical  investigators  and  manufacturers  of  latest generation  stimulating  and/or  recording  devices  that  are  FDA-designated  as  Class  III  (invasive,  posing  significant  risk  of  harm),  to  conduct  clinical  research in  the  CNS.  As  part  of  The  BRAIN  Initiative,  NIH  is  interested  in  reducing  barriers  to  negotiating  such  partnerships  and  also  ensuring  that  new  clinical  studies leverage  manufacturers’  existing  data  demonstrating  safety  and  utility  of  these  devices,  data  that  are  very  costly  to  obtain  and  pose  a  substantial  barrier  to research  progress.

– some well-meaning, competent, responsible technocrats you can put your money on

So long story short, what is the BRAIN Initiative… nothing else the most disturbing development, to the bottom end of the same old imperialism. If and when they can get control of our brains, they get full control over everything else. As crazy and fatalistic as it may sound.

Of course we’re only talking potentialities here. Potentialities… backed by the US government to the tune of 4.5 billions total (at 300-500 millions a year), with a sinister track record of quite successful lab research.

But you’re expected to trust that our worshipful managers are only going to use it to treat the mentally ill and incapacitated. Or antiauthoritarians too… like these guys who tend to not respect the Law (sociopathic disorders). Or those who do activism, or go on student strikes… or riot. And what not… to eventually cure homosexuality, transexuality, sexual deviances, heterosexuality, sexuality itself, religious belief & philosophy (so easily associable with schizoid or autistic disorder), and probably also those « triggering » behavior. Anything that doesn’t suit the normal of the day, or the behavior expected from you in any (authoritarian) social context of the ordinary. If there’s a war on the mind by the technocratic State, that would be their incoming D-Day.

The brains of humans is their last unconquered territory on this planet.