Page 128 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As we may think,” Vannevar explained how one day soon whole
encyclopedias with associative connections would appear magically on the memex screen, and
professionals and laymen alike would turn to it as to a library or oracle. The memex would be
self-teaching and relieve people of the need for memory or recall.
Concurrent with Vannevar’s dream was the arrival of the U.S. Army’s EINAC (Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer) with 18,000 vacuum tubes and miles of wiring, followed by
England’s Mark I (1948), EDSAC (1949), and the United States’ EDVAC (1951), UNIVAC I
(1951), and ILLIAC I (1952). Thus was the cyber revolution set in motion.
For centuries, high-degree Freemasons and wealthy cognoscenti have quietly used gear
models for computation and forecasting the future, at least since the bronze head answered yes or
no to Gerbert d’Aurillac (920–1003), the Benedictine monk-professor at the University of
Rheims elected Pope Sylvester II. From the cybernetics journal Computers and Automation
(October 1954):

We must suppose that Pope Sylvester II, Gerbert d’Aurillac, was possessed of extraordinary knowledge and the most
remarkable mechanical skill and inventiveness. This speaking head must have been fashioned “under a certain
conjunction of stars occurring at the exact moment when all the planets were starting on their courses.” Neither the
past nor the present nor the future entered into it, since this invention apparently far exceeded in its scope its rival, the
perverse “mirror on the wall” of the Queen, the precursor of our modern electronic brain. Naturally, it was widely
asserted that Gerbert was only able to produce such a machine because he was in league with the Devil and had sworn
allegiance to him.

From British intelligence agent Lord Francis Bacon’s seventeenth-century ciphered binary
code to the encrypted Dayton Witch with its cipher book (once the property of the cybernetics
department at Brunel University in High Wycombe just up the road from Sir Francis
Dashwood’s “magickal” Hellfire estate in Oxfordshire), families with wealth and standing have
had access to intellectual, computational, and magical help. Perhaps the U.S. State Department
still has a Black Chamber (Cipher) Bureau at 131 East 37th Street in New York City, just a few
blocks from industrialist J.P. Morgan’s mansion-cum-museum. Why not? The electromechanical
rotor cipher machine known as the Enigma was recently the topic of The Imitation Game, a film
about Alan Turing, the father of modern computation.
Computers, their ciphers and binary code go hand in hand with cryptography and cybernetics
such as were practiced by visionary millionaire George Fabyan (1867–1936), patron of acoustics
and perpetual motion. In fact, the National Security Agency—secretly founded thirty-six years (6
X 6) after Fabyan’s death—honored him with a plaque at the Riverside Acoustic Laboratory on
his three-hundred-acre Fox River Valley estate forty miles west of Chicago. The plague read To
the memory of George Fabyan from a grateful government.
The fact is that high-speed data processing has availed the elite of their dream of social and
eugenic engineering. In 1946, the Cybernetics Group morphed into the Feedback Mechanisms in
Biology and the Social Sciences, and later into the World Federation of Mental Health.
Sandwiched among cybernetics, biology, and mental health was the discovery of LSD, the U.S.
Navy’s Project Chatter, and the 149 subprojects of the CIA’s drugs-hypnosis-pain induction
program with an acronym for public dissemination almost as nifty as HAARP: MK-ULTRA. In
the same timeframe, the U.S. Air Force privatized its research and development arm as RAND
Corporation to protect military projects and cyphers from congressional curiosity. After the
Manhattan Project, polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957) pushed for neural nets (the
conceptual forerunner of the Internet) and mutual assured destruction (MAD) war-game
strategies.