The Penetrated Skull: Broadcasting, Manufactured Madness, and the Diagnostic State
A tracing of schizophrenia, DID, and autism as diagnostic criteria partially constructed through classified/military research, and broadcast technologies real and imagined that made them legible.
I. The Foundational Paradox of Broadcasting
Every medium of communication is, at its root, an attempt to transmit experience across a gap — to collapse the distance between a source and a receiver. From this perspective, the fantasy of William Gibson’s simstim, portrayed in Neuromancer, is simply the logical terminus of the broadcast concept itself. When Heinrich Hertz confirmed Maxwell’s electromagnetic wave theory in 1887, he demonstrated that energy could propagate through space without a material conductor. The psychic and spiritual implications were immediately understood by contemporaries: if invisible waves could carry information, perhaps the mind itself was a kind of broadcast transmitter. As John Durham Peters observes in “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia,” the emergence of radio broadcast fundamentally reorganized the ontology of address: broadcasting enacts anyone-as-someone structures — signals dispatched into the void, meant for no one in particular and received, sometimes shockingly, as if meant for you1. The early twentieth century’s obsession with telepathy was inseparable from this broadcast structure. Both were about signal and receiver; both proposed that information could traverse space without contact, addressed to a mass of strangers each of whom might hear it as a personal transmission.
This sets the deep cultural context: every new broadcast technology has generated a fantasy of the perfectly received, perfectly embodied signal. Cinema gave us the vicarious gaze. Radio gave us the voice in the room. Television gave us the parasocial companion. Peters, following Donald Horton and Richard Wohl’s 1956 essay on parasocial interaction, notes that broadcast media cultivates “intimacy at a distance” — a simulated one-on-one address performed for millions 1. Each step closer to immersion generated both utopian fantasies — universal communication, shared consciousness — and dystopian dread: loss of interiority, invasion of the self.
II. Diagnostic Categories as Media-Historical Artifacts
This essay’s central argument — the argument that runs beneath the literary history of simstim, the classified research programs, and the self-organized testimony of targeted individuals — is that schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder (DID), and autism are partially constructed diagnostic categories, and that their construction has been driven, simultaneously, by the broadcast technologies of their respective historical moments and by classified mind-control research programs that shared those technologies’ fundamental structure: the insertion of experience into a nervous system that did not generate it organically.
Viktor Kandinsky first described the phenomenology that would become schizophrenia’s first-rank symptoms — the experience of thoughts arriving as externally authored, alien to the self — in his 1885 study of pseudohallucinations, providing Eugen Bleuler with the clinical vocabulary the broadcast era would later amplify — though, as the next section shows, the phenomenology Kandinsky named already had a pre-history of its own, one reaching back before psychiatry possessed either the word schizophrenia or a transmission technology adequate to think it with.2
Peters makes the historical co-emergence explicit. Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia” in a lecture at the German Psychiatric Association in Berlin on 24 April 1908 — the year of the first successful transatlantic wireless radio press dispatch 3. Bleuler simultaneously coined the term autismus in his 1911 monograph Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, using it to describe what he identified as one of the core symptoms of adult schizophrenia: “a state of insulation from reality so complete that it excluded other human beings” 4. Autism was not, at its origin, a separate diagnostic category — it was the inward pole of a schizophrenic withdrawal from the overwhelming exterior world of signal, broadcast, and address. Emil Kraepelin had named dementia praecox in 1899, the year Marconi established the first cross-channel wireless telegraph service. Kurt Schneider codified his first-rank symptoms — including thought broadcasting — in 1959, the peak year of American television household penetration 5.
Peters’s argument is that this historical co-emergence is not coincidental. He argues that schizophrenia’s first-rank symptoms “have been consistently expressed in metaphors drawn from mass media, especially radio and TV, to the point that ‘thought broadcasting’ — the experience that one’s thoughts leak out for all to hear — has become a first-rank symptom of the illness” 1. The diagnostic category and the broadcast technology grew up together, each shaping the cultural imagination through which the other was interpreted. The question Peters raises, but does not answer, is whether this co-emergence is merely metaphorical (patients reaching for available cultural vocabulary to describe internal experience) or whether it reflects a deeper structural identity between the phenomenology of broadcast reception and the phenomenology of certain psychotic states.
The answer to Peters’s implicit question, this essay argues, was being worked out in classified research laboratories throughout the same period. But before tracing that answer, the co-emergence Peters identifies requires a third term. If schizophrenia is the diagnostic category that captured the overcrowded receiver — the nervous system unable to distinguish self-generated from externally transmitted experience — autism, as Bleuler himself understood it, named the opposite pole: the nervous system that had never been interpellated by broadcast address at all. Both poles were pathologized by the same diagnostic apparatus, and both will require separate accounting. Martin Cannon’s two landmark essays — The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction (1989, revised 1992) and “Mind Control and the American Government,” published in the British intelligence journal Lobster (issue 23, 1992) — provide the crucial link. Cannon’s work demonstrates that the “spy-chiatrists” working within MKULTRA and its successor programs were not merely exploiting existing psychiatric vulnerabilities — they were actively manufacturing the diagnostic presentations that would later be classified as schizophrenia, DID, and related dissociative conditions. The classified program and the diagnostic category were, in Cannon’s framework, the inner and outer faces of the same institutional project.
DID’s history is the most direct illustration of this dynamic. Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), as DID was then classified, was first introduced in DSM-III in 1980 6. Colin Ross’s 2000 monograph Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality Disorder by Psychiatrists documents a pattern of CIA interest in the creation and utilization of dissociative identity structures that began during World War II, tracing its origins to George H. Estabrooks, who wrote as early as 1943 that it should be possible to manufacture the perfect intelligence operative through hypnotic creation of multiple personalities 7. Cannon corroborates this from the MKULTRA records: “The true history of Estabrooks’ wartime collaboration with the CID, FBI and other agencies may never be told: after the war he burned his diary pages covering the years 1940-45, and thereafter avoided discussing his continuing government work with anyone, even close members of the family. Occasionally, he strongly intimated that his work involved the creation of hypno-programmed couriers and hypnotically-induced split personalities” 8. What would later be classified as a clinical disorder was, in the covert program, a product.
III. The Influencing Machine Before Broadcast: Matthews’s Air Loom and Kandinsky’s Tokists
If schizophrenia’s first-rank symptoms are structurally isomorphic with broadcast reception, the phenomenology should be discoverable before broadcasting existed — and it is. The persecutory delusion of externally inserted experience has a documented pre-history reaching back more than a century before Bleuler, and what that pre-history reveals is a constant form clothed, in each era, in the most advanced transmission technology its sufferer could name. The mechanism changes with the science; the structure does not.
The earliest fully documented instance is James Tilly Matthews, a London tea broker committed to Bethlem in 1797 after disrupting the House of Commons with politically charged accusations, and the subject of what is generally regarded as the first book-length psychiatric case study in English: John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness (1810).9 Matthews believed himself tormented by a gang of spies operating a machine he called the Air Loom; concealed in a cellar near London Wall, it wove “airs,” or gases, into a warp of magnetic fluid and directed the resulting rays at his body across the intervening distance. The assaults had names: “lobster-cracking,” “bomb-bursting,” “lengthening of the brain,” “kiteing.” As Mike Jay documents in his reconstruction of the case, Matthews’s explanatory vocabulary was not arbitrary but drawn precisely from the cutting-edge influence-at-a-distance sciences of the 1790s: pneumatic chemistry, the voltaic battery, and the controversial doctrine of animal magnetism, or mesmerism.10 The Air Loom is the anyone-as-someone structure rendered as machinery a full century before Hertz, a transmitter that inserts sensation, emotion, and compelled action into a body that did not generate them, operated by a hidden cadre for purposes the victim can only infer. What it lacked was a real transmission technology to make it literal. The magnetic fluid did not exist; the form did.
The same structure recurs, its vocabulary updated to the next generation’s transmission science, in the case of Dmitry Perevalov, recorded by the Russian psychiatrist Victor Kandinsky, the clinician who gave the pseudohallucination its name2 — in his 1885 study of the phenomenon.11 Perevalov, convinced he had threatened powerful interests by suing the Obukhov plant, believed himself the target of “tokists” (“users of electric currents”), a corps of secret agents of the Tsarist Third Department who, beginning in 1876, had placed him in a galvanic “tonic connection” — something like magnetic rapport — by applying current to his head. Through this link his thoughts were read outward into his handlers’ minds, while the handlers evoked in him, by the same current, a precisely enumerated catalogue of intrusions: fabricated thoughts; artificially induced skin sensations of itching, burning, and pricking; manufactured emotions of malaise, dread, and unmotivated anger; imposed tastes and smells; compelled inner speech he had consciously to suppress; involuntary vivid imagery appearing against his will; and two distinct channels of voice — “direct speech” heard through the ears and a galvanic “internal hearing” he experienced as transmitted. Allowing only for the substitution of galvanism for microwaves, the catalogue is almost exactly the contemporary targeted-individual symptom cluster: voice-to-skull, the bidirectional read-and-write structure later named synthetic telepathy, induced affect, somatic and olfactory intrusion, motor and speech interference. Perevalov assembled it in the 1880s, before the vacuum tube, before radio, before the transistor.
This is where the pre-history turns dangerous to a literal reading, and the danger has a name: Viktor Tausk. In his 1919 essay “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia”, the canonical treatment of precisely this material, Tausk observed that the influencing apparatus is a recurrent, trans-historical feature of psychotic phenomenology: a diabolical machine just outside the victim’s technical understanding, operated by a persecuting gang, predominantly the physicians who have treated the patient.12 Tausk read the machine as a projection of the patient’s own body and its alienated sensations; that is, as endogenous. On the evidence of Matthews and Perevalov he is hard to refute: when an identical structure appears across centuries attached to mechanisms each of which was, in retrospect, impossible — mesmeric fluid, galvanic rapport — the parsimonious conclusion is that the structure is generated from within and the mechanism confabulated after the fact, in every era, including our own.
The argument of this essay does not require denying Tausk; it requires one distinction he could not have drawn. What is constant across Matthews, Perevalov, and the contemporary targeted individual is the form — the overcrowded receiver, experience arriving from outside the self. What changes is whether, at a given historical moment, a real mechanism matching that form actually exists. For Matthews in 1810 and Perevalov in the 1880s, none did; the Air Loom and the tonic connection were projections onto technologies that could not do what was claimed of them. The wager of everything that follows is that the broadcast and classified-research era is precisely the moment at which that ceased to be true — when the ancient form of the influencing machine was met, for the first time, by transmission technologies that could genuinely insert sound, sensation, affect, and compelled movement into a nervous system at a distance. This is what sharpens Peters’s claim about co-emergence beyond metaphor: the broadcast era did not invent the phenomenology but inherited a form already a century old and supplied it, belatedly, with a mechanism.¹
The word that should give a careful reader pause is first. This essay has documented how reliably classified capability outruns its public timeline: the Moscow Signal, the burned MKULTRA files, subproject 94 surviving as four pages. The purely speculative extension of that pattern is to ask whether the textbook chronology of electromagnetic discovery is less a neutral record than a political settlement, and whether the understanding of microwave hearing and modulated transmission predates its official date not by the usual decades of declassification lag but by something closer to a century — a suspicion that would dissolve the very distinction this section rests on, since a Perevalov reporting a hidden real mechanism is no longer projecting onto an impossible one. The disciplined claim does not go that far. It needs only that the mechanism eventually arrived, and that the gap between when a capability becomes real and when the public is permitted to know it is itself something the apparatus has every reason to keep dark.
Tausk was right about Matthews. Whether he is still right today can no longer be read off the symptom alone — for the first time, the confabulated machine and a real one share the same specifications. Huxley, writing in 1932 at the hinge between the two eras, was the first to give the literalized version its systematic fictional form.
IV. Huxley’s Feelies: The First Systematic Articulation (1932)
Aldous Huxley codified this trajectory in Brave New World. A feelie is a fictional form of entertainment in which the viewer is able to feel all the sensations felt by the protagonist through advanced technology; in the novel’s fictional universe, the masses are kept satisfied using feelies as part of a routine of “synchronized amusement” 13. Huxley’s crucial historical context is that he was reacting to a specific technological transition: the arrival of sound cinema. He believed that the introduction of audio was excessive, arguing in his 1929 essay “Silence is Golden” that sound cheapened film’s emotional impact and that the logical endpoint of sensory escalation was a world where pleasure was so easily obtained that it became dull 14.
Peters’s framework illuminates what Huxley was intuiting: the feelie literalizes the anyone-as-someone address structure of broadcasting at the level of the body. The feelie audience member is not addressed as a specific person receiving another specific person’s experience; they are addressed as any body, receiving any body’s experience. This anonymous universalism is precisely what makes it both utopian (everyone can feel everything) and dystopian (no experience belongs to anyone). Crucially, Huxley’s feelies are not about personal experience being transmitted. They are passive; a broadcast to an audience, however immersive. The user receives another’s sensory experience but is not connected to another living mind. As Laura Frost observes, “Huxley’s feelies reach backward to cinema’s music hall origins and forward to the imagination of technologies such as virtual reality” 14. They occupy the position of both cultural memory and cultural prophecy.
Peters makes the connection to psychiatric diagnosis explicit by noting that Bleuler simultaneously coined autismus and Schizophrenie as two aspects of the same psychic condition: the autistic withdrawal from an external world experienced as intolerably intrusive. Autism, in its original Bleulerian formulation, was the name for a nervous system that had developed countermeasures against a broadcast address — that had, in effect, opted out of the anyone-as-someone structure. Huxley’s feelies are the nightmare version of what Bleuler’s schizophrenic patient was defending against: a broadcast that could not be refused, that arrived in the body whether you consented or not.
V. The Hard Science: From Brain Electrodes to Wireless Stimulation
Robert Galbraith Heath at Tulane (1950s–1970s)
The first systematic attempt to broadcast into a human nervous system came not through electromagnetic waves but through wires. Heath founded the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in 1949, and his work was financed in part by the CIA or U.S. military 15. Heath’s electrodes could produce any affective state on demand. Delgado, reporting on the same technique from parallel experiments at Yale, described it: “Radio stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses” (Delgado, qtd. in Cannon, The Controllers 7). Martin Cannon, in The Controllers, is precise about what this means: “the evocative phrase ‘colored visions’ clearly indicates remotely-induced hallucination” 8. The technology that would become simstim was here in embryonic form: a device for artificially generating subjective sensory-emotional experience.
Cannon identifies Heath’s experiments as the direct institutional ancestor of the abduction-as-mind-control scenario he proposes, noting that Heath “discovered that he could control his patients’ memory (a feat which, applied in the ufological context, may account for the phenomenon of ‘missing time’); he could also induce sexual arousal, fear, pleasure, and hallucinations” 8. But the import for the present argument goes further. Heath’s ability to control memory is the capacity to manufacture autobiographical narrative — to insert events, emotional valences, and relational textures into a patient’s personal history. This is the experimental basis for what would later be diagnosed as dissociative fugue and DID: conditions where personal history has been fragmented, rearranged, or partially erased. The question Cannon raises is whether some portion of the clinical population carrying those diagnoses received them not because of organic trauma but because of administered trauma, conducted under the auspices of a classified program.
The erotic dimension was present from the outset. Heath explored the possibility of altering the sexual orientation of a gay man through electrical stimulation of pleasure sites of the brain, fitting him with a device he could use to stimulate the septal region on his own. The man stimulated his own brain up to five hundred times per hour and “protested each time the unit was taken away from him” 15. The self-stimulating patient — able to generate pleasure states at will, obsessively returning to the device — is already the simstim addict before simstim has a name. Peters identifies this as a clinical instantiation of what he calls “made feelings” — the first-rank schizophrenic symptom in which one’s own emotional states are experienced as externally produced and inserted 1. Heath’s electrode manufactured “made feelings” on demand. Heath’s most explicit attempt to modulate sexual behavior through electrode stimulation was published in 1972 under the title “Septal Stimulation for the Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male,” co-authored with Charles Moan. The subject, identified as Patient B-19, was a 24-year-old man in police custody for marijuana possession who agreed to participate while under legal duress — an arrangement Heath’s 1973 Senate questioners found troubling.16 Electrodes were implanted in the septal region, hippocampus, amygdala, and other deep structures. B-19 was shown heterosexual pornographic material while his septal pleasure site was stimulated, and was later provided a female sex worker recruited and paid for by Heath, with state court approval, to attempt intercourse while the electrodes remained active and wired to recording equipment in an adjacent room. Heath reported the session a success. The subsequent follow-up was less conclusive: B-19 returned to homosexual activity, reporting that he did so for money when unemployed; his underlying orientation had not changed 17. What the experiment demonstrated was precisely what the Delgado record would confirm three years later from the opposite methodological direction: that sexual arousal and sexual behavior are neurologically modulable under direct stimulation, but that the underlying identity state — the stable sense of what one is attracted to, who one is — resisted the electrode. The mechanism could produce the behavior without producing the person. Heath’s program was financed in part by the same CIA and military apparatus whose interest in behavior modification this essay has traced; the attempt to weaponize that apparatus against homosexuality produced, as its primary finding, evidence that sexual identity is more durable than sexual behavior — a result that went largely unremarked in the clinical literature that followed.
José Delgado and the Wireless Step (1960s)
The transition from wired to wireless was achieved by Delgado at Yale, who invented the “stimoceiver” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a miniature depth electrode that could receive and transmit electronic signals over FM radio waves 18. Cannon, having reviewed MKULTRA subproject 94 documents at the National Security Archive, notes that the earliest reference to remotely-applied electronic brain stimulation in the CIA’s financial records is a 1959 document — and that, because subproject descriptions “rarely change from year to year, leaving us little idea as to when this subproject began,” the true origin date may be substantially earlier 8. The landmark demonstration of stopping a charging bull by remote control in a Madrid bullring in 1963 was not merely theatrical; it was the first public proof that behavior could be modulated at a distance, through electromagnetic transmission to an implanted receiver. Delgado himself asserted, speaking in 1966, that his experiments “support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion, and behaviour can be directed by electrical forces and that humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons” 18. He prophesied a day when brain control could be turned over to non-human operators by establishing two-way radio communication between the implanted brain and a computer 18.
One case from Physical Control of the Mind warrants examination in the same frame as Heath’s B-19 experiment. An eleven-year-old boy (identified as A.F.) with severe psychomotor epilepsy underwent electrode implantation in both temporal lobes. During depth stimulation of a contact on the surface of the left temporal lobe, designated point LP, the patient expressed open pleasure and affection toward the male interviewer, accompanied by what Delgado describes as a “general passivity of behavior.” Delgado notes that these expressions “could be linked, more or less intuitively, to feminine strivings” 18. In the subsequent interview, stimulation of the same point produced a more direct verbal expression: the patient began discussing “the desire to get married,” expressed confusion about his sexual identity, and upon repeated excitation said, “I was thinkin’ if I was a boy or a girl — which one I’d like to be,” concluding: “I’d like to be a girl” 18. The effect appeared consistently under stimulation of that specific point and not under stimulation of adjacent ones. Delgado reports this without drawing clinical conclusions about gender identity as a stable trait, and the present essay does not do so either. Read alongside Heath’s B-19 result, however, the pattern across both programs is coherent: electrical stimulation of specific brain structures could reliably produce gender-adjacent states and modify sexual arousal, but — as the B-19 follow-up confirmed — could not durably rewrite the underlying identity. What these classified and classified-adjacent programs collectively established, without intending to, is that gender and sexual identity are grounded in neurological substrate, experienced as authentic, and more resistant to external modification than the behaviors that express them. That finding has received essentially no attention in the subsequent clinical literature on gender identity — a silence worth noting, given how directly it bears on the contemporary political argument that such identities are exogenous, malleable, or manufactured.
VI. The Frey Effect and the Wireless Auditory Intrusion (1961)
Meanwhile, a parallel discovery was unfolding that required no implant at all. The microwave auditory effect, also known as the Frey effect, consists of the human perception of sounds induced by pulsed or modulated radio frequencies. The perceived sounds are generated directly inside the human head without the need of any receiving electronic device. The effect was first reported by persons working in the vicinity of radar transponders during World War II, and in 1961 neuroscientist Allan H. Frey published the first systematic study of the phenomenon, reporting that power densities 160 times lower than “the standard maximum safe level for continuous exposure” could induce sonic perceptions 19.
The Frey effect makes Peters’s argument about broadcasting and schizophrenia suddenly, shockingly material. Peters argues that schizophrenia’s first-rank symptoms are structurally isomorphic with the normal phenomenology of mass broadcast reception 1. The Frey effect demolishes even the fragile distinction between metaphorical and literal: if pulsed microwave radiation can insert sounds directly into a skull without the subject’s awareness, then the question of whether an “inner voice” was generated by one’s own nervous system or transmitted from outside becomes, from the inside, unanswerable. Cannon draws the same inference: “Hearing voices has, of course, long been recognized as a symptom of schizophrenia — but what if the technological inheritors of the Delgado legacy have discovered a mechanism for inducing, or reproducing, this symptom? How do we tell the difference between a ‘manufactured madman’ and the real item?” 20. The question points in two directions simultaneously. Toward the schizophrenic and the TI, it asks whether the overcrowded receiver was naturally occurring or manufactured. But it also illuminates, by inversion, the nervous system the apparatus could never weaponize in this way: the autistic receiver, which was not overcrowded but structurally insulated from broadcast address — whose symptom was not the failure to filter transmission but the absence of interpellation altogether. That nervous system presented no disposal problem of the kind Cannon identifies. It was simply classified as deficient and set aside. The operational implications of that misclassification would not become visible for decades.
Cannon’s question is not rhetorical. It follows directly from the MKULTRA record he had reviewed. He notes that as early as 1953, John C. Lilly warned the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in a letter refusing to brief the CIA, FBI, and NSA on his electrode research, that Dr. Antoine Remond in Paris had already demonstrated that electrode stimulation of the human brain could be applied without neurosurgical supervision, meaning “anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a person covertly, with no external signs that electrodes have been used on that person. I feel that if this technique got into the hands of a secret agency, they would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they had done” (Lilly, qtd. in Cannon, The Controllers 10). Lilly was writing in 1953. The Frey effect was published in 1961. By 1974, voice-to-skull experiments at Walter Reed had achieved intelligible speech transmission without any implant at all 21. The progression from Lilly’s warning to the patent record took less than two decades.
VII. Project Pandora and the Moscow Signal (1965–1970)
The full institutional weight of the American security state was brought to bear on the question of wireless neural modulation through a classified program triggered by Cold War discovery. Project Pandora, formally DARPA Program Plan 562, was an exploration of the behavioral effects of microwaves prompted by the discovery that the American Embassy in Moscow had been continuously irradiated with microwave signals since the early 1950s. The CIA theorized that the Soviets were attempting behavioral modification. The diplomats being irradiated daily were kept in the dark 22. Cannon confirms the scope from the MKULTRA record: the projects exploring this area included “ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, PANDORA, MKDELTA, MKSEARCH and the infamous MKULTRA,” and the CIA was “not the only government agency involved in this research. Indeed, many branches of our government took part in these studies — including NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as all branches of the Defense Department” 8.
Ross Adey’s research at the Brain Research Institute of the University of California, funded by the CIA as part of Pandora, produced the most scientifically significant and most disturbing findings. Adey demonstrated how ELF-modulated RF signals could lead to the release of calcium ions from neural cells — the so-called “confusion weaponry” that could impair neural communication at power levels too low to detect 23; it should be noted that the concept of “confusion weaponry” has persisted into the present, ranging from the discourse around Havana Syndrome — in which the leading scientific hypothesis centers on pulsed directed radiofrequency energy as the cause of debilitating neurological symptoms reported by US diplomatic and intelligence personnel since 2016 24 — to President Donald Trump’s claim, made in a January 2026 interview with the New York Post, that a “discombobulator” was used during the 2026 US intervention in Venezuela, where incumbent Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and transported to New York 25. Cannon summarizes the program’s ambition precisely: the goals of Pandora were “to discover whether a carefully constructed electromagnetic signal could direct the mind. The obvious question becomes how many and with how much accuracy can behavioural states or ‘frames of mind’ be intentionally imposed” (Keeler, qtd. in Cannon, The Controllers 12). Where Pandora’s classified goals were the operational application of Adey’s neurochemical findings, Peters’s media theory provides the conceptual vocabulary: both the broadcast transmitter and the classified microwave emitter were attempting to insert specific states into nervous systems that had not generated those states themselves — the manufactured made-feelings of a weaponized parasocial address.
Cannon’s “Mind Control and the American Government” details the most disturbing implications of the RHIC-EDOM (Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control and Electronic Dissolution of Memory) technology described in Lincoln Lawrence’s 1969 work Were We Controlled? and confirmed by Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control. According to Lawrence, RHIC could “remotely induce hypnotic trance, deliver suggestions to the subject, and erase all memory for both instruction period and the act which the subject is asked to perform” 20. In Senate hearings on CIA drug testing in 1977, Senator Richard Schweiker asked CIA MKULTRA administrator Sidney Gottlieb directly about radio hypnotic intracerebral control; Gottlieb confirmed “a current interest, running interest, all the time in what affects people’s standing in the field of radio energy” and, pressed on whether radar could “wipe out memory in animals,” replied: “I can believe that, Senator” 26. The diagnostic implication of RHIC-EDOM is direct: a subject who underwent this procedure would subsequently present with precisely the symptom profile then being codified as dissociative amnesia and, in more complex applications, as multiple personality disorder.
VIII. The Patent Record: Wireless Voices in the Head (1971–1989)
The patent record provides the clearest public-domain evidence of what was being developed in parallel to the classified programs. In 1971, Henry K. Puharich and J. L. Lawrence patented a Hearing System (US 3,629,521) in which electromagnetic signals could be used to wirelessly transmit audio to the brain, inducing perceivable sound in line with the Frey effect 27. In 1974, the first successful unclassified voice-to-skull experiment was conducted by Dr. Joseph C. Sharp and Mark Grove at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, transmitting intelligible words directly into a human head with the skull itself as the receiver 21. In 1976, Robert G. Malech patented “Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves” (US 3,951,134), proposing that wirelessly transmitted signals could detect and influence EEG patterns 27. By 1989, Philip L. Stocklin and Wayne Brunkan had each patented versions of microwave hearing devices explicitly describing the use of microwaves to induce sound in the head of a person 27.
Peters’s argument about the structural identity between schizophrenic symptom and broadcast address becomes, when read against this patent record, not merely a philosophical observation but a technical specification. Each patent is an attempt to engineer the scrambling of private and public experience that Peters identifies as broadcasting’s constitutive pathological possibility. Cannon draws the same conclusion from the classified program side: “I presume that if a suitably-wired subject’s inner ear can be made into a microphone, it can also be made into a loudspeaker — one possible explanation for the ‘voices’ heard by abductees” 8. Cannon is writing about the alien abduction phenomenon as a cover story for mind control experimentation. Peters is writing about the structural homology between broadcasting and schizophrenia. They are, from opposite methodological directions, describing the same technical apparatus and its diagnostic consequences.
IX. Cannon’s Thesis: Manufactured Madness and the Disposal Problem
Cannon’s most important contribution to the present argument is his identification of what he calls “the disposal problem”: the operational challenge facing any mind-control program whose subjects cannot simply be liquidated after experimentation. Cannon argues that by using the UFO mythology as a cover story, “the experimenters may have solved the major problem with the work conducted in the 1950s — the disposal problem, i.e., the question of ‘What do we do with the victims?’” 8. The UFO cover story is, in this reading, an epistemological weapon: a subject who reports alien abduction is automatically discredited, their testimony immediately categorized as delusional or psychotic, their experience structurally inaccessible to legal or journalistic investigation. The subject becomes their own keeper — not through bars, but through diagnosis.
The diagnostic mechanism is precise. Cannon notes that subjects “often (though not always) lose all memory of these events; they find themselves back in their cars or beds, unable to account for hours of ‘missing time.’ Hypnosis, or some other trigger, can bring back these haunted hours in an explosion of recollection” 8. This phenomenology maps exactly onto the presenting symptom cluster of dissociative amnesia: gaps in autobiographical memory, recovery of content under hypnosis, affective responses inconsistent with reported circumstances. Cannon’s argument is that the dissociative symptom cluster, in a subset of patients, is not a response to organic childhood trauma but a produced artifact of a technology that can insert and erase memory through electronic stimulation of specific brain regions. What the clinician diagnoses as DID may, in some cases, be the patient’s nervous system accurately reporting what was done to it.
In The Controllers, Cannon documents the explicit CIA interest in manufactured dissociation from the MKULTRA record: “The CIA’s spy-chiatrists spent enormous sums mastering Mesmer’s art” 8. He notes that Joseph A. Meyer of the National Security Agency proposed implanting “roughly half of all Americans arrested — not necessarily convicted — of any crime,” creating a system of continuous computer monitoring of millions of “subscribers” 8. That a senior NSA scientist publicly proposed mass neural implantation — the hardware implementation of the anyone-as-someone address structure — is the logical endpoint of Peters’s trajectory rendered as policy proposal.
Cannon is careful to note the evidentiary limits of his argument. The FOIA-released MKULTRA documents provide only four pages on subproject 94, compared to “a veritable flood of documents” on drug experimentation 8. CIA veteran Miles Copeland admitted to a reporter that “the congressional subcommittee which went into this sort of thing got only the barest glimpse” 8. Victor Marchetti, a fourteen-year CIA veteran, confirmed in a 1977 interview that the mind control research “continues, and that CIA claims to the contrary are a ‘cover story’” 8. The argument is not that every psychiatric patient is a mind-control subject. It is that the diagnostic categories through which such subjects would be processed were designed — both by the cultural vocabulary of broadcast technology and by the operational requirements of programs that needed their subjects discredited — to make that processing invisible. Running in parallel with Heath’s electrode experiments, and under the same MKULTRA umbrella Cannon documents, was a subproject that pursued behavioral modification through chemical rather than electromagnetic means — but whose object was, structurally, the same: the weaponization of sexuality as a lever of behavioral control. Operation Midnight Climax, established in 1954 under CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb and run by Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White, set up wired safehouses in San Francisco and New York in which CIA-employed sex workers lured men from bars, dosed them with LSD without consent, and subjected them to sexual encounters while agents observed from behind two-way mirrors. Senate investigators were subsequently told that the stated goals included studying “mind control and sexual behavior” — specifically whether the combination of drugs and sex could produce disclosure of information or durable behavioral change 28. Gottlieb himself testified that the original intention was to produce “a documented sound movie” of behavior under chemical influence, to understand the susceptibility of drugged subjects to manipulation 26. The program was terminated in 1966 and its records largely destroyed; it produced, by Gottlieb’s own 1977 Senate admission, no reliable behavioral modification results. Like Heath’s B-19 experiment with septal electrodes, Midnight Climax demonstrated the same institutional finding from the chemical direction: the apparatus could temporarily disinhibit behavior, but could not reliably rewrite the person who exhibited it. The two programs — one electromagnetic, one pharmacological — together constitute the mid-century classified research record on sexuality as a target of behavioral modification, and they reached the same conclusion from opposite methodological directions.
X. Andrija Puharich: The Node Between Science, Intelligence, and the Paranormal
Puharich is a uniquely important figure because he personally connected the legitimate electromagnetic research world to the intelligence community to the paranormal underground that would eventually generate TI discourse. While founding the Round Table Foundation in Maine, Puharich worked on chemical and psychological warfare research at Edgewood Arsenal and was involved with CIA’s projects MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE 29. He was a legitimate inventor with fifty-six patents, including a genuine microelectronic hearing aid — itself an engineering embodiment of the Frey effect, transmitting audio to the inner ear through electromagnetic signal — while simultaneously consorting with psychics, mediums, and the broader paranormal community.
Peters’s framework illuminates why this figure is so productive: Puharich occupied the exact intersection Peters identifies as the constitutive site of modern pathology: the boundary between self-generated and externally transmitted experience, the zone where the anyone-as-someone address of broadcasting can no longer be distinguished from the voice one generates oneself. Puharich found that 8 Hz brainwaves characterized psychic states in healers and clairvoyants, and then noted that ELF fields at similar frequencies could induce those states externally 30. The boundary between “genuine telepathy” and “technologically induced telepathic experience” became, in his framework, irrelevant. Whether the transmission originated in another mind or in a transmitter was a distinction that might not be detectable from inside the receiving skull.
Cannon uses Puharich’s work to illuminate the technology behind the alien abduction phenomenon’s “missing time”, noting that Heath’s ability to control memory, combined with RHIC-EDOM’s proposed capacity to erase memory of both the instruction period and the commanded act, would produce precisely the amnesiac phenomenology that abductees describe and that clinicians diagnose as dissociative amnesia 8. Puharich is the figure who first proposed that psychic and electromagnetic experience might be the same phenomenon viewed from different epistemic positions — which means that a clinical population experiencing phenomena currently classified as psychotic might include individuals whose reports are phenomenologically accurate but whose interpreters lack the technical vocabulary to credit them.
XI. Gibson’s Simstim in Historical Context
What becomes clear when locating Gibson’s simstim within this history is that he was working both backward — toward Huxley’s feelies — and alongside a parallel classified research tradition he almost certainly knew nothing about directly. The ASP technology in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977) was written when the Frey effect had been published for sixteen years, when Project Pandora was complete, when the first voice-to-skull experiment at Walter Reed had occurred three years earlier. As Gibson stated in an interview: simstim was “a metaphor for contemporary media — a way to deconstruct media, and a way of pushing back against it. It was easier to convert it into sci-fi and have people plug TV directly into their necks” 31.
Peters’s anyone-as-someone structure maps precisely onto Gibson’s simstim world. Simstim in the Sprawl is commercial, voluntary, and entertainer-initiated: a star’s experience is packaged and broadcast. The security state research was coercive, non-consensual, and institutional. Gibson imagined the entertainment version of the technology; MKULTRA was building the interrogation version. But the deepest convergence is diagnostic: the subject of successful simstim use and the subject of a successful RHIC application would present with identical phenomenology to an examining clinician — an experience of inhabiting another’s sensorium, of sensory input arriving from outside the self, of subjective boundary dissolution between what I feel and what is transmitted to me. One would be diagnosed as a consumer; the other as a patient; the third, the TI, as psychotic.
The technology appears in embryonic form as ASP — Apparent Sensory Perception — in Gibson’s debut published story, where Parker “writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the industry’s human cameras” 32. The performer’s subjectivity is turned into a transmission. The ASP audience receives that transmission as experience. The story addresses the gender-body problem inherent to the concept: “Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex” 32. By Neuromancer (1984), simstim is fully realized: persons are “fitted with a broadcast rig, and their senses are broadcast live, so that other persons elsewhere can experience them” 33. Critics have observed that simstim functions in the novel’s social ecology like Huxley’s feelies, as tools of mass pacification and celebrity construction 34. Simstim is parasocial intimacy made literal, the parasocial bond consummated in sensorium. The logical endpoint of Peters’s trajectory is Gibson’s technology.
XII. The Strange Days Bridge: From Broadcast Fantasy to Forensic Record
Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) introduces a crucial dimension neither Gibson nor Huxley fully explored: the recording of experience as evidence. The SQUID technology in the film doesn’t just transmit entertainment; it captures crimes, making it possible to vicariously experience crimes from the perpetrator’s point of view, grounding the technology in the reality of assault on women and racially-motivated police brutality 35.
Peters’s framing is politically resonant here: thought broadcasting, in the psychiatric literature, is categorized as a form of “passivity experience”; the subject undergoes a loss of experiential ownership 1. SQUID recordings weaponize this loss. The film asks: what if you could not merely see the assault but feel it from inside the victim’s body? Would that be unignorable? Peters argues that broadcasting’s deepest pathology is not that it inserts false information but that it makes experience itself unmoored from persons, available to be separated from its source, recorded, replayed, transmitted. Bigelow’s SQUID makes this pathology visible as political fact: in a racist society, the unmooring of experience from persons is not a phenomenological crisis but a civil rights crisis. Whose experience counts as credible evidence? Whose sensorium is legible to power? The TI’s testimony presents exactly this problem: experience reported as externally inserted, categorically dismissed as psychotic.
XIII. MindNet, the BBS Underground, and the Emergence of Targeted Individual Discourse
The targeted individual phenomenon, as a self-organized community, crystallized in the early 1990s at the intersection of the technical record documented above and a new communications infrastructure — the BBS and Usenet networks — that allowed geographically isolated experiencers to find one another. The central publication of this emergent community was the MindNet Journal, an email-distributed text-file newsletter edited by Mike Coyle and published under the banner of VERICOMM in Oakland, California. The MindNet Journal was distributed via the Majordomo mailing list system at c2.org, archived on FTP servers, and disseminated through FidoNet BBS networks 36. Its masthead motto: Quid veritas est? — “What is truth?”
The foundational text of the MindNet corpus is Anna Keeler’s “Remote Mind Control Technology,” originally published in Full Disclosure magazine in 1989 and republished as MindNet Journal Vol. 1, No. 23a. Keeler’s article is a disciplined survey of the existing scientific and military literature on electromagnetic behavioral modification, drawing on Frey’s microwave auditory research, Project Pandora, and Adey’s calcium efflux findings. She makes the key inference directly: “Recall again the goals of Pandora to discover whether a carefully constructed electromagnetic signal could direct the mind. The obvious question becomes how many and with how much accuracy can behavioural states or ‘frames of mind’ be intentionally imposed, that is, apart from the certain technological capability to promote disorganization and degradation of perception and performance through use of the fields” 37.
Equally significant is the 1992 report Microwave Harassment and Mind-Control Experimentation by Julianne McKinney, Director of the Electronic Surveillance Project at the Association of National Security Alumni. McKinney, a former U.S. Army Area Intelligence Case Officer, approached the TI phenomenon with an unusual credential and an unusual caution: “Typically, persons who complain of being ‘zapped by radio waves’ and of ‘hearing voices’ are stigmatized as psychotic, delusional or schizophrenic. Being mindful of this, as well as aware of the treatment accorded UFO and psychic phenomena ‘freaks,’ we approach this subject with a high degree of caution” 38. The trap McKinney identifies is exactly Peters’s: the symptom of hearing external voices in one’s head is simultaneously the primary diagnostic criterion for schizophrenia and the primary phenomenological description of a successful voice-to-skull technology deployment. The two cannot be distinguished from the symptom alone. But the symptom that McKinney’s subjects reported was not only auditory. McKinney’s 1992 report documents a convergent symptom cluster across subjects with no prior contact with each other: sleep disruption and deprivation; burning sensations on skin surfaces; the perception of severe physical buffeting of the head without accompanying vestibular symptoms such as dizziness — a distinction McKinney notes corresponds precisely to effects described in a 1973 unclassified document on pulsed microwave transmission, which reported that “with somewhat different transmission parameters, you can induce the perception of severe buffeting of the head, without such apparent vestibular symptoms as dizziness” 38; and, as the primary and most diagnostically consequential complaint, hearing voices that the subjects experienced as externally generated and conversational in character — not internally generated intrusive thoughts of the kind associated with psychosis, but voices that addressed them, commented on their actions, and in some cases appeared to transmit instructions. McKinney notes that WRAIR had by 1973 demonstrated that pulsed microwave audiograms could produce exactly this: the “schizophrenic sensation of ‘hearing voices’ which are not part of the recipients’ own thought processes” 38. The phenomenological gap between the internally disordered voice of psychosis and the externally addressed voice of a successful technology deployment is not available from the symptom presentation alone. It is available only from the technical record — and only if the clinician has read that record. The framework the TI community eventually developed to describe this bidirectional structure was “synthetic telepathy”: the combination of inbound voice transmission (Frey effect, V2K, microwave audiograms) with an outbound channel that could read neural signals before they were vocalized. The outbound channel found its public-domain institutional form in DARPA’s “Silent Talk” program, launched in 2009 with a $4 million budget, which aimed to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals” by decoding pre-speech EEG patterns and transmitting them to an intended interlocutor 39. The explicit goal was synthetic telepathy as a military communication technology. The framework’s foundational document within the TI community was the affidavit filed by John St. Clair Akwei in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. as Civil Action 92-0449 40. Akwei alleged that the NSA operated a program of Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) that could remotely read the evoked potentials of the human brain for tracking and surveillance, and could “send messages through the nervous system to affect” a subject’s performance 40. The case was dismissed procedurally by Judge Stanley Sporkin without reaching its merits. Akwei subsequently published a detailed technical affidavit in the Australian magazine “Nexus” in 1996; that affidavit circulated through the same FTP and BBS networks as the “MindNet Journal” and became one of the founding documents of the TI community’s self-understanding. The evidentiary status of the Akwei affidavit is exactly that: a plaintiff’s account, unverified in court, describing a classified system the NSA has neither confirmed nor denied. Its significance to this essay is not as proof that the system exists, but as evidence of how the TI community assembled the bidirectional framework — inbound and outbound channels together constituting what they named synthetic telepathy — from the available technical literature, the patent record, and individual testimony, at the precise moment when that assembly was first becoming possible through networked information sharing.
Cannon’s work and the MindNet archive were in conversation. Cannon’s The Controllers circulated through the same FTP and BBS networks as the MindNet Journal. Both drew on John Marks’s FOIA-retrieved MKULTRA files at the National Security Archive. Both cited Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control. Both were attempting to construct a counter-archive against the epistemological capture that Peters identifies as broadcasting’s pathological tendency: the tendency to discredit, as delusional, precisely those reports that accurately describe the anyone-as-someone structure operating on a body without its consent. The MindNet Journal was the distribution mechanism through which declassified documents, scientific papers, and FOIA-retrieved evidence were assembled into a coherent counter-narrative, transforming scattered records into an indexed, searchable archive available in ASCII across global networks.
What the MindNet corpus captured was the 1990s baseline of the TI phenomenology — a cluster anchored in auditory intrusion, vestibular manipulation, and the bidirectional framework of synthetic telepathy. The contemporary TI community’s self-reported symptom range is considerably broader, and its expansion maps onto the trajectory this essay has already traced: each decade of classified and above-board neurotechnology development has produced a corresponding widening of what TI subjects report as experienced. The 1990s accounts centered on voices (V2K), burning sensations (consistent with directed microwave energy), and what McKinney’s subjects described as the perception of head buffeting without accompanying dizziness — a phenomenology legible against the 1973 WRAIR documents she cited. Contemporary TI accounts, as documented in survivor testimony compiled by organizations including Freedom From Covert Harassment and Surveillance (FFCHS) and in the academic literature on the phenomenology of “gang stalking” and electronic harassment 41, report a significantly expanded sensory register. Visual hallucinations — geometric patterns, faces, and in some accounts coherent scenes — are now routinely described alongside the auditory. Olfactory intrusions, experienced as persistent odors with no environmental source, appear in clusters of reports. The technical substrate for remote olfactory induction, long absent from the public record, received its first direct demonstration in a 2025 experiment by Chizhov, Yan-Huang, Ribeiro, and Gupta, who used focused ultrasound aimed at the olfactory bulb through the forehead to reliably produce distinct artificial smells — campfire, fresh air, garbage, ozone — in conscious human subjects without implanted electrodes or any direct nasal contact; different focal spots within a 14 mm range produced different scents, and the effect was validated in a blinded trial 42. The structural parallel to the Frey effect is exact: as pulsed microwave radiation inserts sounds into the skull without a receiver, focused ultrasound now inserts smells into the skull without a transmitter in the nasal cavity. Tactile effects — the sensation of being touched, struck, burned, or penetrated at specific body locations — are among the most common contemporary complaints, and they are not phenomenologically discontinuous with what Heath’s electrode work established: that somatic sensation is neurologically modulable, producible on demand at specific body sites, by stimulation of corresponding cortical regions. The technical substrate for remote tactile induction is less thoroughly documented in the public patent record than the auditory channel, but the reports on directed-energy non-lethal weapons explicitly lists “skin heating” and “pain induction” among the enumerated capabilities of existing high-power microwave systems 43 — capabilities confirmed by the Active Denial System’s operational deployment, which uses 95 GHz millimeter-wave energy to produce an intense burning sensation at skin surfaces without tissue damage 44. Gustatory hallucinations — the experience of tastes with no oral source — appear less frequently in TI reports but are documented 41, and they are consistent with what Delgado’s temporal lobe stimulation experiments produced in subjects who reported flavor sensations under electrode activation of specific sites 18.
The most analytically significant expansion of the contemporary TI phenomenological range, however, is the shift from passive sensory insertion to reports of motor interference — what the TI community describes variously as “puppeteering,” “body hijacking,” or involuntary movement. Where the 1990s reports centered on what was being put into the subject (voices, pain, vestibular sensations), contemporary accounts increasingly describe something being done through the subject: specific limbs moving without voluntary initiation, facial muscles contracting into expressions the subject did not intend, speech being produced that the subject experienced as externally generated rather than self-authored 41. The phenomenological vocabulary for this — the sense that one’s own body has become an instrument of another will — is directly available in the medical literature on alien hand syndrome, a well-documented neurological condition in which damage to the supplementary motor area or corpus callosum produces a limb that acts independently of conscious intention, reaching, grasping, or striking without the subject’s volition 45. What alien hand syndrome demonstrates, as a naturally occurring clinical phenomenon, is that the boundary between voluntary and involuntary action is a neurological artifact rather than a metaphysical given: it is produced by specific brain structures whose normal function is to tag motor outputs as self-initiated, and it can be disrupted. Delgado’s 1969 work in Physical Control of the Mind documented exactly this: electrode stimulation of the motor cortex in conscious subjects produced limb movements that the subjects recognized as not their own, and — crucially — Delgado recorded subjects attempting to suppress those movements and failing. The movement was generated; the intention was not. Remote induction of this effect without implanted electrodes — through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which is now a fully above-board clinical tool used in depression treatment — has been demonstrated in laboratory settings since the mid-1980s: a focused TMS pulse to the motor cortex produces an involuntary finger twitch, a hand extension, a foot movement, in subjects who experience the movement as externally caused 46. The clinical literature on TMS routinely notes that subjects describe the induced movements using language that directly parallels TI motor-interference reports: the limb moved “by itself,” it was “not me.” The diagnostic question the TI report raises — whether the claimed motor interference is a psychotic first-rank symptom (made actions, the experience that one’s actions are controlled by an external agent 5) or an accurate report of an externally induced motor event — is, again, unanswerable from the phenomenology alone. It requires recourse to the technical record: and that record confirms that the effector mechanism for remote motor interference exists, operates at distances relevant to the TI framework, and has been publicly demonstrated in laboratory and clinical contexts for four decades.
The most extreme reports in the contemporary TI corpus — and the most clinically improbable to standard psychiatric evaluation — are accounts of joint dislocation: the experience that specific joints, most commonly shoulders, fingers, and jaw, have been displaced from their normal anatomical position by an externally applied force, without accompanying impact. These reports occupy the hardest epistemological position in the TI literature, because their claimed mechanism — remote manipulation of connective tissue and joint capsule — has no established public-domain technical substrate of the kind that the auditory and motor interference reports can invoke. The directed-energy literature documents thermal and pressure effects on tissue at high power densities, and focused ultrasound, which is in clinical use for non-invasive tissue ablation and has been investigated as a non-lethal weapons platform, is capable of producing mechanical force at depth in biological tissue without surface contact 47. Whether the effector mechanism for the reported joint dislocations is acoustic, electromagnetic, or something else — or whether these reports represent the outer boundary where the TI phenomenological framework generates experiences that are not corroborated by available technology — is a question the public technical record cannot resolve. What it can do is establish the analytical frame: the same epistemological apparatus that rendered auditory hallucinations automatically diagnostic of psychosis rather than of a successful V2K deployment now renders joint dislocation reports automatically diagnostic of somatic delusion rather than of a directed-energy effector. The diagnostic instrument does not adjust its thresholds in response to the technical literature. It was not designed to, and that design choice — whatever its origin — continues to serve the disposal function Cannon identified. The contemporary TI’s full-spectrum sensory and motor symptom cluster, read against this history, is not an escalation of delusion. It is the phenomenological record of four decades of expanding technical capability arriving, without institutional acknowledgment, in the bodies of people who lack the vocabulary to be believed.
Peters writes as a media theorist noting the structural homology between schizophrenic symptom and broadcast address. McKinney writes as a former intelligence officer documenting the weaponization of that homology. Keeler writes as a researcher mapping the scientific literature that made the weaponization conceivable. Cannon writes as an investigative journalist arguing that the cover story generated by that weaponization was the UFO abduction phenomenon, and that the psychiatric diagnoses applied to its subjects were part of the disposal mechanism. All four are, in different registers and with different epistemological commitments, describing the same phenomenon: the deliberate and systematic dissolution of the boundary between self-generated and externally transmitted experience, and the diagnostic apparatus that made that dissolution clinically invisible.
XIV. The Unified Genealogy: Constructed Diagnoses and the Penetrated Skull
What this history reveals is that the diagnostic categories of schizophrenia, DID, and autism are not timeless entities discovered by disinterested science. They are constructions that emerged, in their current forms, at the intersection of two historical forces: the broadcast technologies that reorganized the ontology of address (making anyone-as-someone experience a routine feature of modern daily life) and classified research programs that took the logic of broadcast address — the insertion of experience into a nervous system that did not generate it — as their operational template.
Bleuler coined schizophrenia and autism in 1908 and 1911 respectively, in the decade of wireless telegraphy’s global spread. Schneider codified the first-rank symptoms — including thought broadcasting — in 1959, at the peak of television penetration and in the same year as the earliest MKULTRA subproject 94 document referencing remote ESB. Multiple Personality Disorder entered DSM-III in 1980, a decade after RHIC-EDOM’s first public description and in the same year that Colin Ross’s subsequent research would identify as the beginning of the CIA’s active utilization of induced dissociation 7. That same 1980 revision is the first in which autism appeared as a diagnostic category separate from schizophrenia: in DSM-I (1952) and DSM-II (1968), autistic symptoms appeared only as features of childhood schizophrenia; the diagnostic instrument that formally split the two poles of Bleuler’s original formulation apart did so in the same edition that codified the dissociative disorder his classified programs had been manufacturing 48. And it was DSM-III that introduced, for the first time, psychiatric diagnoses related to trans identity: “transsexualism” for adolescents and adults, and “gender identity disorder of childhood,” appearing under “psychosexual disorders” seven years after homosexuality was removed from DSM-II in 1973 49. Scholars including Arlene Istar Lev and Deborah Rudacille have characterized the GID addition as a political maneuver to re-stigmatize homosexuality through a new diagnostic vehicle following its removal; others contest this reading 50. What is uncontested is the convergence: the single DSM revision that codified DID, separated autism from schizophrenia, and introduced gender identity as a psychiatric disorder was produced in the same institutional moment as the classified programs this essay has traced — and the same electrode research that had, a decade earlier, attempted to modify sexual orientation and produced gender-adjacent states under stimulation. The 1980 DSM-III was not merely a clinical document. It was a diagnostic settlement of the preceding three decades’ most contested questions about the relationship between identity, behavior, and the brain — questions that the classified apparatus had been pursuing by other means since 1950. The DSM itself, as a diagnostic instrument, was developed in a period of intense classified research into exactly the symptom clusters it was designed to classify. The question is not whether these conditions exist; they clearly do, as organic responses to organic and administered trauma, lived experience, and evolutionarily conserved behaviors. The question is whether the diagnostic categories through which they are processed were partially shaped by institutional interests in making certain experiences unspeakable — categorically discredited before the subject opens their mouth.
Cannon’s disposal problem is Peters’s broadcast pathology rendered operational. If the anyone-as-someone structure of broadcasting means that experience can be transmitted into a body without that body’s consent — and this is what the Frey effect, the stimoceiver, RHIC-EDOM, and the voice-to-skull patent record collectively demonstrate — then the subjects of that transmission require a disposal mechanism that does not require liquidation. The diagnostic category serves this function: it renders the subject’s testimony a priori inadmissible, not through legal suppression but through epistemological categorization. The schizophrenic cannot bear witness because their account is definitionally a symptom. The TI cannot bear witness because their account is definitionally delusional. The abductee cannot bear witness because their account is definitionally fantastic. All three categories of report — the psychotic, the electronically harassed, the alien-abducted — describe the same phenomenology: an externally transmitted experience, arriving inside the skull, indistinguishable from self-generated experience, insisted upon as real by the body that received it. The disposal mechanism was precise in its targets. It operated on the overcrowded receiver — the nervous system that could not distinguish internal from external address. The no-bind receiver, the nervous system that had never been interpellated by that address at all, presented no such problem; it had nothing to dispose of. It was simply classified as deficient and set aside.
The Frey effect made the boundary between these categories physically permeable. The MindNet Journal and Cannon’s essays documented the permeability in counter-archival practice. Gibson aestheticized it as entertainment. Bigelow weaponized it as forensic evidence. Peters named it as the constitutive condition of broadcasting itself. What happened after was, in some sense, inevitable: communities of people for whom the question of whether their inner experience was externally transmitted was not a philosophical abstraction but an urgent, lived crisis, forming in the same networked infrastructure that carried the Sprawl’s aesthetic and the security state’s declassified documents. The penetrated skull — the Frey effect’s material fact — became the site where media theory, science fiction, covert research, clinical diagnosis, and personal testimony converged. And the diagnostic apparatus that managed this convergence was not neutral. It was part of the system. That same apparatus, built around the pathology of the overcrowded receiver, also processed the skull at the opposite pole — not as dangerous or delusional, but as deficient. The classification was different; the institutional interest in rendering that nervous system epistemically manageable was the same.
The two pathologizations were not symmetric in their methods, but they were symmetric in their function. The apparatus that built a disposal mechanism for the overcrowded skull — the schizophrenic, the TI, the abductee — had no equivalent mechanism for the no-bind skull, because the no-bind skull presented no testimony requiring disposal. The autistic nervous system did not experience the penetrated skull as a crisis of external transmission; it had never been fully inside the broadcast structure to begin with. The same diagnostic machinery that rendered some testimony inadmissible by labeling it psychotic rendered other testimony inadmissible by labeling it asocial, disordered, deficient. The two pathologizations served different institutional ends — and, as the following sections will show, produced a symmetrical irony: the nervous system that the security state classified as disordered turned out to be precisely the one it needed most.
XV. The Autistic Analyst: Operational Recognition of the No-Bind
In 2013, two Mossad veterans, physicist Leora Sali, who had spent years on the technology side of Israeli intelligence while raising an autistic son, and intelligence officer Tal Vardi, launched a program called Ro’im Rachok within the Israel Defense Force’s Unit 9900, the visual intelligence division specializing in satellite and aerial imagery analysis. Their hypothesis was not philanthropic: they proposed that autistic visual perception was not impaired but operationally superior in specific high-value intelligence tasks 51. Testing within Unit 9900 confirmed it. One group of autistic analysts completed an intelligence analysis in three months that had been projected to take eighteen 51. Over 400 soldiers now serve through the expanded “Spectrum of Talent” program, deployed across satellite imagery interpretation, software quality assurance, data classification, electronics, and electro-optics 52. Unit 9900 now recruits specifically for visual pattern recognition, sustained attention to anomalous signals in complex datasets, and what the IDF describes as the ability to detect “even the smallest details, undetectable to most people” 51.
Peters’s framework provides the precise theoretical vocabulary for what Unit 9900 discovered empirically. In Pinchevski and Peters’s cybernetic extension of the “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia” argument, schizophrenia represents positive feedback run rampant: the overcrowded broadcast structure in which every signal arrives as if personally addressed; while autism represents the “no-bind”: a total disconnect between the message level and the meta-message level 53. In Gregory Bateson’s framework, the no-bind is not an absence of intelligence but an absence of the social-communicative interpellation that ordinarily filters and orients perception toward faces, emotional signals, and communicative intent. The autistic analyst who can sit for eight hours scanning high-resolution satellite imagery and find it “relaxing,” as one Unit 9900 corporal described his work, is demonstrating a perceptual profile that is precisely not interpellated by the anyone-as-someone address structure 51. Where neurotypical attention is drawn toward social salience, autistic attention sustains on non-social pattern, anomaly, and signal against noise. This is not a deficit. It is a different broadcast receiver architecture: one that was categorized as pathological by a diagnostic apparatus built around the norms of social broadcast address, and is now being recognized as operationally decisive in contexts where social broadcast address is irrelevant.
The United States intelligence community has arrived at the same operational recognition through a slower and more reluctant institutional process. A 2023 RAND Corporation report, Neurodiversity and National Security, confirmed that neurodivergent individuals, including autistic people, already serve as intelligence officers, engineers, senior managers, and possibly high-ranking executives across US national security organizations, though most conceal their diagnoses due to clearance barriers and institutional discrimination 50, 51. The same report documents that one defense contracting CEO described how his autistic employees could examine a blurry satellite image obscured with foliage and distinguish between a Russian MiG aircraft, a Ukrainian MiG, and a Russian MiG painted like a Ukrainian MiG 54. RAND identifies pattern recognition, analysis, visualization, attention to detail, and hyperfocus as the autistic cognitive strengths most directly relevant to national security missions, a list that maps exactly onto the tasks for which Unit 9900 recruited 54. Yet the structural barriers that autistic clearance applicants face are themselves diagnostic artifacts: polygraph protocols treat the atypical physiological responses of autistic candidates (different heart rate, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response profiles under social stress) as indicators of deception rather than as neurological difference 52, 53. The apparatus built to certify trustworthiness was not designed for the nervous systems it now needs. The operational convergence extends beyond RAND’s documentation. In December 2020, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — the US intelligence agency responsible for processing satellite and aerial imagery for warfighters, policymakers, and first responders — launched the Neurodiverse Federal Workforce pilot, the first such program in the US federal government, explicitly placing autistic interns in geospatial and imagery analysis roles 58. NGA Deputy Director Stacey Dixon stated that “neurodiverse talent adds significant value to the geospatial-intelligence tradecraft” 58. The task domain is identical to Unit 9900’s: sustained attention to high-resolution spatial data, anomaly detection in complex visual fields, pattern discrimination at resolutions that defeat neurotypical attention. The NGA program was inspired directly by the IDF model; the US intelligence community was not discovering the principle independently but ratifying it 51. Across the Atlantic, GCHQ — the UK’s signals intelligence agency — has operated a dedicated neurodiversity support service for over two decades. Former GCHQ director Robert Hannigan estimated that roughly one in four of the organization’s staff has some neurodiverse condition, and stated explicitly that GCHQ “has actively sought to recruit this kind of diverse workforce” 59. The CIA has followed: its director of artificial intelligence stated in 2023 that the agency is modifying its interview procedures specifically to make it “easier for the neurodivergent community to present themselves” 60. The pattern is now documented across four major intelligence organizations — IDF Unit 9900, NGA, GCHQ, CIA — spanning three nations and a decade of parallel institutional convergence.
While the IDF institutionalized autistic perceptual advantage directly, DARPA pursued a parallel approach from the opposite direction: attempting to engineer neurotypical analysts toward the same perceptual state through peripheral nerve stimulation. Announced in March 2016 and now completed, DARPA’s Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program investigated “non-invasive neurotechnology in combination with training to boost the neurochemical signaling in the brain that mediates neural plasticity and facilitates long-term retention of new cognitive skills” with explicit target applications including “target discrimination and intelligence analysis” 61. The mechanism is peripheral nerve stimulation: electrical stimulation of nerves outside the brain, primarily the vagus and trigeminal nerves, to trigger the release of neuromodulators including acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine that govern synaptic plasticity and attention state 61. TNT program manager Doug Weber summarized the premise: “Recent research has shown that stimulation of certain peripheral nerves, easily and painlessly achieved through the skin, can activate regions of the brain involved with learning” 62.
The TNT program funded eight research teams at seven institutions. The applications most directly relevant to the present argument are two. An Arizona State University team, working in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the 711th Human Performance Wing, tested trigeminal nerve stimulation protocols “with two groups of volunteers — one studying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and another practicing marksmanship and decision-making” 63. A Wright State University team “work[ed] with volunteer intelligence analyst trainees studying object and threat recognition to determine the impact of non-invasive VNS on that training” 63. Object and threat recognition in complex visual imagery is precisely the task at which Unit 9900’s autistic analysts had already demonstrated six-to-one performance advantages over neurotypical baselines. DARPA was attempting to purchase, through peripheral nerve stimulation, what the IDF had found was already present, at no engineering cost, in the autistic nervous system.
The irony sharpens further when the TNT neuromodulator profile is compared with the clinical literature on vagus nerve stimulation and autism. DARPA’s mechanism, VNS triggering the release of acetylcholine and norepinephrine to enhance attention, pattern recognition, and sustained focus in neurotypical analysts, is pharmacologically adjacent to the mechanism by which the same VNS is being investigated as a therapeutic intervention for ASD. The vagus nerve is a key component in regulating autonomic function, social-emotional state, and the brain regions associated with ASD; transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation has been shown to activate those regions and modulate the mood and visceral states associated with social communication 64. The same peripheral nerve, stimulated by the same class of device, is being pointed simultaneously in opposite directions: toward neurotypical analysts, to enhance their attentional focus and pattern recognition toward autistic-style perception; and toward autistic individuals in clinical settings, to modulate their autonomic and social-emotional responses toward neurotypical broadcast reception. The technology is attempting to move people in both directions across the same axis, depending on which side of the diagnostic boundary they were born on.
There is no declassified CIA documentation that directly addresses the application of peripheral nerve stimulation to intelligence analyst cognition; the classified program lineage runs, as this essay has traced, from MKULTRA’s electrode research through Delgado’s stimoceiver through Project Pandora, and DARPA’s TNT is the contemporary above-board continuation of that trajectory under a different institutional home and ethical framework. What the TNT program does establish, through its own public documentation, is that the program which spent decades developing technology to insert experience covertly into unwilling nervous systems, the program whose disposal mechanism was psychiatric diagnosis, has an institutional successor that is now openly developing technology to enhance the voluntary nervous systems of analysts doing the same work that autistic people do naturally. The wheel has turned. The security state that pathologized the no-bind nervous system, used its diagnostic categories to discredit testimony and manage experimental subjects, and recruited the anyone-as-someone broadcast architecture as its operational model, has arrived at the point of attempting to engineer that broadcast architecture out of its own analysts; and of recruiting, in Unit 9900’s template, the nervous systems it once classified as disordered. Cannon’s disposal problem has an ironic resolution: the disposed-of are now the most operationally valued, and the operational institution is spending millions of dollars trying to replicate their native perceptual state in everyone else.
XVI. Autism, the Internet Era, and the Politics of Diagnostic Denialism
Peters’s “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia” does not end with schizophrenia. Its concluding movement gestures toward autism as the characteristic condition of the internet era, just as schizophrenia was the characteristic condition of the broadcast era. This argument was developed more fully in a 2016 collaboration between Peters and Amit Pinchevski, “Autism and New Media: Disability Between Technology and Society,” published in New Media and Society. Pinchevski and Peters propose that autism and schizophrenia are “twinned disabilities of the meta-communication system” 53 — where schizophrenia is the overcrowded broadcast structure and autism is the no-bind described above. The internet, they argue, constitutes an environment of low-affect, text-based, asynchronous interaction in which autistic communication styles find “habitat free of the burdens of face-to-face encounters”: an affordance structure that mirrors, and in some ways amplifies, autistic phenomenology 53.
This argument rests on what turns out to be a critical empirical foundation that distinguishes autism from the other diagnostic categories this essay has examined: whereas the essay’s argument about schizophrenia, DID, and the constructed dimensions of their diagnostic categories points toward institutional manufacture and epistemic capture, autism’s status as a biological reality is unusually well-supported by evolutionary evidence. Autism-related genes show a markedly lower evolutionary mutation rate than the genomic background, indicating that autism susceptibility genes have been more tightly conserved across the animal kingdom than typical genome regions 65. A 2017 PNAS study demonstrated deep evolutionary conservation of autism-related genes from insects through mammals, documenting variation in social responsiveness analogous to autistic traits in species as distant as chimpanzees and honeybees 66. Further, large-scale genomic studies have identified an excess of genetic variants in human-accelerated regions in both ASD and schizophrenia cohorts — genomic elements that were largely conserved throughout mammalian evolution but evolved rapidly in the human lineage — suggesting that both conditions may have increased in prevalence specifically during human evolution, not as artifacts of modern diagnosis but as genuine consequences of human neurological complexity 67. The reported rise in autism prevalence in recent decades, contrary to the claims of political actors seeking an environmental cause, reflects better diagnostic instruments and expanded definitional criteria rather than an emergent epidemic 68.
This evolutionary evidence is directly relevant to the present essay’s argument about the political function of diagnostic categories. The essay has argued that schizophrenia, DID, and related dissociative conditions were partially shaped by institutional interests in rendering certain experiences epistemically invisible. The current right-wing political treatment of autism inverts this mechanism but reproduces its structure: rather than using a diagnostic category to discredit testimony, autism denialism — most prominently advanced by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who declared autism an “epidemic” that “destroys families” and whose proposed causal framework centers on vaccines despite decades of contrary evidence — attempts to use the diagnostic category to produce a population of people whose neurology is reframed as preventable, environmental damage rather than an ancient and conserved variation in human cognition 68. Kennedy’s April 2025 press conference, which described autistic people as unable to “hold a job”, “write a poem,” or “go out on a date,” prompted immediate and widespread refutation from autistic people and their families 68. Disability justice advocates have drawn explicit parallels between this rhetoric and the eugenics-adjacent language of Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding’s 1920 concept of “life unworthy of life,” and between Kennedy’s proposals and the institutional histories through which Hans Asperger, for whom Asperger’s syndrome was named, facilitated eugenic programs during the Third Reich 69.
The structural parallel between autism denialism and the detransitioner narrative — the right-wing political mobilization of individuals who have ceased gender transition as evidence that transgender identity is a “social contagion” — is analytically significant, and it has been noted by researchers. Both campaigns follow the same epistemological template as the discredited ROGD (Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria) hypothesis: a methodologically flawed study — in the ROGD case, Lisa Littman’s 2018 paper based on surveys of parents recruited from three anti-trans websites — is elevated by political actors into legislative and policy frameworks, despite rejection by the American Psychological Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and sixty other major professional organizations 70. The ROGD hypothesis is, as one analyst observed, “almost exactly the same study as the first anti-vax study” in methodology: a self-selected sample of parents whose children have identities those parents reject, presented as clinical evidence of an environmental cause 71. In both cases, autism-as-vaccine-damage and trans-identity-as-social-contagion, the political apparatus frames a neurological or identity variation as an exogenous contamination requiring elimination, producing a target population whose self-report is defined as symptomatic of the very contamination being alleged. Peters’s structure recurs: the diagnostic apparatus is not neutral but is deployed to pre-discredit specific categories of testimony.
What gives the ROGD epistemological move particular irony, in the context of this essay’s argument, is what the classified research record already established about gender and sexual identity before the culture war debate was framed. Heath’s B-19 experiment — conducted with the same CIA-adjacent funding, by the same researcher, in the same period as the electrode work this essay has traced — explicitly attempted to use septal region stimulation to reorient a gay man’s sexual behavior. It produced temporary arousal under stimulation but failed to alter the underlying orientation; B-19 returned to homosexual activity once the electrodes were removed 17. Delgado’s A.F. case, three years later, produced gender-adjacent states under temporal lobe stimulation that were experienced as authentic by the subject — but again, only under stimulation. The consistent finding across both programs, neither of which was designed to establish this, is that gender-adjacent and sexual-identity states are neurologically grounded, experienced as authentic, and more durable than the behaviors they produce. The apparatus could manufacture the behavior without manufacturing the person. This is not a conclusion the classified programs drew — homosexuality remained in the DSM until 1973, in the same edition that had been the contemporary framework for Estabrooks and Gottlieb — but it is the conclusion the data supports, and it was produced by the same institutional apparatus that the essay has traced manufacturing schizophrenic and dissociative presentations in the same decade. The argument that trans identity is exogenously produced, socially contagious, and amenable to elimination through diagnostic reclassification is, from the perspective of the classified program lineage, the same argument applied to a different target: the claim that an inner identity state is a surface behavior susceptible to external modification, when the experimental record consistently shows that the identity outlasts the modification attempt.
The question of comorbidities between these diagnostic categories in trans populations is an area of genuine and ongoing scientific inquiry, and it is important to represent the evidence accurately rather than in its most politically convenient form. The ASD–gender dysphoria comorbidity is the best-established: a 2022 meta-analysis in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found a pooled prevalence of ASD diagnoses in gender-dysphoric individuals of 11%, with a significant overall effect size for elevated ASD traits in gender-diverse versus cisgender control populations 72. A separate large-scale study of 641,860 individuals found that transgender and gender-diverse people have, on average, higher rates of autism and other neurodevelopmental diagnoses than cisgender populations across five independent datasets 73. The relationship between DID and gender dysphoria is more complex and more contested. The first systematic review on the question — Soldati et al., published in Sexual Medicine in 2022 — found DID prevalence in gender-dysphoric samples ranging from 0% to 1.5% across three studies, a range overlapping with the 1–3% general population estimate, suggesting that DID may not be significantly overrepresented in trans populations when measured by formal diagnosis 74. However, elevated dissociative symptoms — a different and broader category than formal DID diagnosis — have been observed in some trans population studies, including one using the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule that reported a 29.6% prevalence of probable dissociative disorders in a trans sample 75. The clinical literature also documents cases where individuals initially presenting with gender dysphoria were subsequently re-diagnosed with DID after extended assessment, suggesting diagnostic complexity rather than simple comorbidity 74. What unites the ASD and DID literature in trans populations is the researchers’ consistent conclusion that the comorbidities, wherever they are found, call for more carefully tailored clinical care — not for the delegitimization of gender identity as such.
What the comorbidity data reveals, read through Peters’s framework, is not a set of pathological contaminations but a cluster of nervous systems that share a characteristic relationship to social communication and its broadcast structures. ASD, as Peters and Pinchevski argue, represents the no-bind — the refusal or incapacity to be interpellated by the anyone-as-someone address of face-to-face social communication. Gender dysphoria represents, at minimum, a systematic mismatch between the body’s address in social space (as gendered by others) and the subject’s self-experience. Dissociation represents the fragmentation of the self that receives social address into multiple receiving positions. All three conditions share, at their phenomenological core, a disrupted or contested relationship between the address structure of social broadcast — what the social world broadcasts toward the subject — and the subject’s capacity to receive, integrate, and respond to that address as a unified self. The political campaigns against all three — autism denialism via MAHA, trans-identity denialism via ROGD, DID skepticism via the “sociogenic fantasy” model — are not coincidentally concurrent. They share a common target: nervous systems that decline the terms of broadcast reception upon which social institutions depend. What the full history traced in this essay makes possible is a final observation that goes beyond the familiar claim that diagnostic categories are politically constructed.
The more specific claim this history supports — and which cannot, in the nature of things, be definitively proved — is this: diagnostic categories do not merely follow political winds. They track the epistemological requirements of the institutions that process the people they describe. The apparatus that needed schizophrenia as a disposal category built, or at minimum exploited, the diagnostic vocabulary that made schizophrenic testimony inadmissible. The apparatus that spent four decades manufacturing dissociative states did so in parallel with the clinical codification of DID, in the same DSM revision, in the same year. And the apparatus that now needs autistic cognition as an analytical asset — documented across four intelligence agencies in three nations, converging between 2013 and 2023 — is colliding, structurally if not consciously, with a political movement whose stated goal is to eliminate the diagnostic category through which that cognitive phenotype is currently identified, and however imperfectly, supported. The collision need not be coordinated to be consequential. The intelligence apparatus does not need to oppose MAHA for MAHA to threaten the pipeline of autistic analysts on whom the apparatus increasingly depends. The history of diagnostic categories in this essay is not a history of conspiracies; it is a history of structural convergences whose outcomes were not random. If the current political campaign to reframe autism as a preventable environmental epidemic succeeds — suppressing diagnosis, dismantling support infrastructure, redirecting research toward elimination — the autistic cognitive phenotype does not disappear. It returns to the condition it occupied before 1980: unrecognized, unaccommodated, and, in the specific context that concerns this essay’s entire argument, uncleared. The apparatus would then find itself in the position it occupied before it discovered the problem: spending millions of dollars attempting to engineer, through peripheral nerve stimulation, the perceptual architecture it had legislated out of its own talent pool. Whether that irony is visible to the people presently driving the political campaign is, at this point, an open question. Whether it will eventually become visible to the apparatus is not.
Notes
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2. Kandinsky, Viktor. “Zur Lehre von den Hallucinationen.” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, vol. 11, no. 2, 1881, pp. 453–464. Also published as Kritische und klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der Sinnestäuschungen. Berlin: Friedländer, 1885. https://zenodo.org/records/1999743
3. Embryo Project Encyclopedia. “Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939).” Arizona State University. https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/paul-eugen-bleuler-1857-1939
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