In 2010, DARPA’s visionary director, Dr. Regina Dugan, moved to Google as an executive, and in 2016, she transferred to Google’s competitor, Facebook, running a mysterious project called Building 8.171 In 2018, she moved again, to run Wellcome Leap, a health technology breakthrough innovation project of Wellcome Trust. Her peregrinations offer another example of the incestuous links between Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the military and intelligence agencies.
According to veteran CIA officer Kevin Shipp, Silicon Valley CEOs who accepted In-Q-Tel contracts would become some of the 4.8 million Americans subsequently pressured into signing CIA “State Secret Contracts,” which subject signatories to twenty-year prison sentences, property forfeitures, and other draconian reprisals imposed by secret courts for even minor violations of arbitrary provisions—including admitting to signing the contract: “Once he signs that secrecy agreement, that Silicon Valley entrepreneur is now functionally the indentured servant of the agency. It binds him and his company for life, and the agreement itself is classified.”172
Wired’s seed funding came from MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, whose brother, John Negroponte, was the first Director of National Intelligence, notorious for his support of Central American death squads. Wired’s central function was to “scrub every last particle of progressive thinking from reporting on the then-developing online world and to promote a pro-military/pro-corporate/pro-intelligence agency view within the digital media and technology community,”173 according to McCarthy, who lived and worked in San Francisco in the 1990s and organized the first conference on monetizing the web. When he saw his first copy of Wired, Dr. Timothy Leary reportedly called it “the CIA’s answer to Mondo 2000.”174
In 2015, Wired emerged as a promoter of a particular brand of autism epidemic denial known as “Neurodiversity.” By normalizing autism as “neurodiversity,” this movement seeks to dilute autism numbers, deny the vaccine association, and promote the larger view that all vaccines are safe and vaccine injuries are the delusions of crackpots. This “movement” has spawned an army of “activist” trolls weaponized to attack autism researchers, advocacy groups, and even families of vaccine-injured children. Steve Silberman, a writer for Wired since 2010, published the book Neurotribes in 2015 to massive acclaim and highly orchestrated publicity. It became the manifesto for the new “autism rights” movements, which also demonize medical freedom and food safety advocates. Its tactics include online attacks and aggressive disruption of public events, including conferences and film screenings.
Wired is also the fountainhead of the equally sinister movement transhumanism, which advocates for the integration of human beings and machines. The movement’s ancillary aims include extending the lifespans of key Silicon Valley billionaires indefinitely and “liberating humanity from biological restraints”—using AI, novel therapies like stem cells and nanobots, vaccination, and subdermal chips. Jacques Ellul, an early pioneer, described transhumanism’s elegant capacity for top-down control of humanity:
For the psychocivilized society, the complete joining of man and machine will be calculated according to a strict system, the so-called “biocracy.” It will be impossible to escape this system of adaption because it will be articulated with so much scientific understanding of the human being. The individual will have no more need of conscience and virtues. His moral and mental furnishing will be a matter of the biocrats’ decisions.175
Transhumanism, in its various doctrinal approaches, has fervent acolytes among the Silicon Valley elites, including C-suite titans at Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google Engineering Director Raymond Kurtzweil, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, satellite and biotechnology titan Martine Rothblatt, and Bill Gates. In-Q-Tel has made transhumanism one of the persistent themes of its long-term investment strategies.
A celebration of transhumanism, from In-Q-Tel’s website.176
Not everyone is a fan: Francis Fukuyama has called the transhumanism movement “the greatest threat to humanity.”177
Schwartz served as a consultant on the 1998 sci-fi disaster film Deep Impact and the 1992 futuristic film Minority Report, which follows a special PRE-CRIME police unit able to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes. Emerging reality seldom disappoints Schwartz’s past predictions; in 2020, a Chinese whistleblower revealed that the Chinese government has widely deployed facial recognition technologies that can detect guilty thoughts against dissident minority groups. A March 3, 2021, article in the Guardian predicts that demands by government enforcement agencies will make remote emotion detection technologies a $36 billion industry by 2023.178
Schwartz’s auguring skills are legendary. One of his early plots for GBN scenarios tested strategies by a major airline for surviving a coronavirus pandemic. TIME Magazine’s 2004 profile focused on Schwartz’s unerring prognosticating: “Very rarely have we really missed,” he told TIME of his forecasting. “More often our failure is in getting people to take it seriously.” The TIME article mentioned one of his most impressive fortune-telling stunts: In 2000, as part of a study for a Senate commission, Schwartz predicted “the horrifying possibility of terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center.”179
In 2016, as senior vice president of strategic planning at Salesforce.com, Schwartz chaired a session at the World Government Summit titled “How governments get ready for the unthinkable.”180 Three thousand participants from 125 countries attended that year. Barack Obama delivered the keynote speech; Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum and the head of the World Bank, put a happy face on global crisis as a potential path to the cashless society so coveted by international banksters: “The Digital Currency: Is It the Way of the Future?”