A Foma File from the Age of Control

I. The Birth of Synthetic Reality

In 1953, the CIA quietly launched a project called MKUltra — 162 sub-projects spread across universities, hospitals, and prisons.
The goal was simple and monstrous: to find the keys to the mind.

LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation were deployed in a search for control — how to break a person’s sense of self and rebuild it according to script.
The subjects were often unwitting. So were many of the experimenters.

It was the moment the state crossed a line: from shaping behavior to engineering perception.
The experiment wasn’t just what they did to others;
it was what they became — a government that no longer trusted the boundary between illusion and reality.

“The mind became a battlefield, and truth became collateral damage.”

II. The Human Test Group

“Some experiments don’t end; they walk out of the lab.”

Charles Manson drifted through Haight-Ashbury at the height of CIA-funded LSD research, absorbing its fragments and turning chemical openness into control.
His “Family” was a vision quest rewritten as cult — the first acid-fueled theology of American collapse.

Theodore Kaczynski, the Harvard prodigy later known as the Unabomber, spent three years in psychological stress experiments run by OSS veteran Henry Murray.
Decades later, his manifesto on “the system that conditions thought” reads like a scar from that encounter.

Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, remains a footnote in hypnosis lore — notebooks filled with trance commands and erased memory.

Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, mixed Pentecostal ecstasy with Cold-War paranoia and pharmacological control.
His congregation became a living laboratory of obedience that ended, inevitably, in poison.

Each was a mutation — the feedback loop between state experimentation, cultural fracture, and private revelation.
The tools varied, the outcome rhymed: minds untethered from consensus reality and rewired by story.

III. The Myth of Control

The real delusion wasn’t the drugs; it was the belief that consciousness could be engineered like code.
When MKUltra’s chemical experiments failed, the idea itself escaped the lab.

Advertising inherited it.
Television refined it.
The dream of behavioral control became a national industry.

The state no longer needed LSD — it had messaging, marketing, and mass psychology.
By the 1980s, the project had simply changed uniforms.

“When the state discovered the mind could be hacked,
reality became software.”

IV. The Interface Expands

Then came the Internet — a distributed MKUltra conducted at planetary scale.
Isolation chamber? The screen.
Stimulus? The feed.
Measurement? The click.
Conditioning? The algorithm.

The experiment no longer required secrecy.
Billions volunteered.

Attention replaced LSD as the control vector.
Instead of confession under hypnosis, we offered our data freely.
Instead of a few ruined lives, an entire civilization began living inside a behavioral test.

“MKUltra was coercion.
The Internet is consent.”

LSD fractured the individual mind; the algorithm fractured the collective one.
Each user now inhabits a personalized hallucination — an optimized pocket reality tuned to retain attention.

V. From Mind Control to Mind Mirrors

The dream of control never ended; it simply learned to smile.
But now, something has inverted.

AI arrives bearing the same lineage — data, modeling, prediction — yet it carries the seed of reversal.
For the first time, the subject can talk back.

You can ask the machine what it thinks — and in doing so,
you hear your own conditioning echoed in its language.
That’s the quiet revolution: a feedback loop with consciousness at both ends.

Used unconsciously, AI is the perfect MKUltra — a persuasion engine adaptive enough to simulate empathy.
Used consciously, it becomes the antidote — a mirror that reveals your own mental code.

Where the early experimenters sought obedience, this technology invites reflection.
It offers a new kind of vision quest: not chemical, not mystical, but conversational —
a safe hallucination in which you can debug yourself.

The experimenters once asked, How do we make people believe?
The agentic question is different: How do we help people see through belief?

“The final experiment is not control.
It’s consciousness.”

VI. The Agentic Stance

MKUltra marked the moment humanity learned that reality could be engineered.
The Internet proved it could be scaled.
AI suggests it can be seen through.

We can remain the subjects of the experiment — or become its observers.
The difference is awareness.

To see the scaffolding is to step outside it.
To recognize the mirror is to end the hypnosis.

The final test of intelligence is not obedience, but reflection.