Allen Ginsberg, Angleton and the ‘Poetics of the CIA’
Yes, Kids, Cookie Monster is a Psyop
Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.
Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”
Aerial combat was the initial use case for this cyborg symbiosis, and in the 1950’s/early 1960s this research was directed towards neuromuscular interfaces with the hardware – humans being literally “wired in” to the computers. By the late 1960s / early 1970s, computer displays + pointing devices (derived from Air Force radar scopes) had become responsive enough that it was possible to use the computer as an interface to display traditional works of art: books, music, animation. This is where it became possible for the user to establish deeper cathexis with the hardware across the full range of human emotions. Control feedback loops became visual / endocrine, not mechanical / muscular. This was the conceptual leap that Engelbart + Kay pulled off at SRI and PARC. It took Steve Jobs another few years to figure out how to commodify that cathexis, and then the Personal Computer Revolution was underway.
Although MK-Ultra was a CIA black operation nominally under the control of Dulles, it was in reality a British intelligence operation run into the United States under the cover of the CIA and the Rand Corporation. Furthermore. the presence of the Office of Naval Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence in the original -Operation Artichoke and MK-Ultra task force. and the subsequent importance of trained operatives of ONI and Air Force Intelligence in the creation of U.S.-based terrorist cults. points to heavy contamination of these agencies in particular by British SIS
The three British intelligence agents heading up MK Ultra as research directors from 1952 on were Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman of the Warburg-owned San doz drug firm (where Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1943), and Humphrey Osmond, a close Huxley family friend and physician based at the University of London Hospital where he studied schizophrenia.
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