“Summary of Remarks by Mr. Allen W. Dulles at the National Alumni Conference of the Graduate Council of Princeton University Hot Springs, Va., April 10, 1953,” General CIA Records, Cia-Rdp70-00058r000200050069-9 →.
Timothy Melley, “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States,” New German Critique, no. 103 (2008).
For the history of MKULTRA, see John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (Times Books, 1979); Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2020); and H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (Trine Day, 2009).
For Bledsoe’s work on facial recognition, see Stephanie Dick, “The Standard Head,” in Just Code, eds. Gerardo Con Diaz and Jeffrey Yost (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming); Kashmir Hill, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy As We Know It (Random House, 2023); and Shaun Raviv, “The Secret History of Facial Recognition,” Wired, January 21, 2020 →.
For MKULTRA Subproject 94, see MKULTRA DOC_0000017497 →.
CIA memo, November 22, 1961.
José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (Harper & Row, 1969).
CIA memo for chief, Technical Services Division, February 7, 1964 →.
Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (Basic Books, 1993). 133; Simone Natale, Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life After the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976).
Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (January 1966).
Crevier, AI, 139.
An illuminating series of blog posts on this topic can be found here: “Again Theory: A Forum on Language, Meaning, and Intent in the Time of Stochastic Parrots,” In the Moment (blog), September 6, 2023 →.
See for example “Atheist Nightmare” →.
For the neuroscience of magic, see Stephen L. Macknik et al., Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (Picador, 2011).
Ramsey Dukes, S.s.o.t.b.m.e. Revised: An Essay on Magic (Mouse That Spins, 2001), 9.
I’m using “magick” here as a shorthand for occult traditions that see the relationship between perception and reality as far more complicated than a materialist paradigm can account for. Although the word “magick” is most often associated with Aleister Crowley, I am invoking it more in reference to the philosophies of the proto-surrealist artist Austin Spare and the tradition of “chaos magick” that his work would later inspire.
I’d like to thank Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical Magic for being my guide to all things magical and magickal.
John Mulholland, John Mulholland’s Book of Magic (Dover, 2001).
For a biography of Mulholland, see Ben Robinson and John Nicholls Booth, The Magician: John Mulholland’s Secret Life (Lybrary.com, 2008). For Mulholland’s work on MKULTRA, see Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake.
There was a magic trick of sorts embedded in the name of this company. It’s easiest to see by copy-pasting the name into a text box with a serif font.