CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

To Unspeak or Not to Unspeak: That Is the Pentagon’s Problem

Leonard Nimoy used to do the Vulcan mind-meld with his fingers spread on your face — my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts — and just like that he had your secrets. Spooky. Beautiful, too, ask me. Two minds touching, not a mouth moving. I bought it whole, a kid on a TV tray sucking down the Cold War. What I didn’t know was that the actual spooks were taking notes.

Because DARPA wants the mind-meld for real, and no fingers required. Around 2009 they cooked up Silent Talk — soldiers trading orders straight off the brainwaves, no lips, no radio squawk for the other guy to triangulate. Then a synthetic-telepathy grant. Then, 2018, the big one with the big mouthful of a name: Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology. N3. Six labs paid to build a hat that reads your brain and writes back into it. Read and write, dig. The machine listens to your cortex and then it talks back, closing the loop between the grunt and the drone swarm. Officially: run the swarm, run cyber-defense, “team” with the computer. Fuck of a euphemism, team.

Why, you ask? They told us, out loud, no waterboarding required. The program boss explained that war’s getting too fast now — drones, AI, cyber — too fast for a meat brain to keep up. So the fix isn’t to slow the war down. The fix is to speed the meat up. Read that twice, ask me. The lag they want gone is you. The half-second where a person sees a thing, weighs it, and sometimes goes, naah, I won’t. The flinch. The second thought. The kid who lowers the rifle. That half-second is the enemy now, and they’re building a helmet to delete it.

Here’s the kicker. The science-fiction women called this sixty years ago, and they came down the other way. Joan Slonczewski — a working microbiologist, she knew her cells — wrote a planet called Shora, all women, all ocean, in a book called A Door into Ocean. The empire invades and the Sharers don’t shoot. They unspeak the bastards. Withdraw the word. Refuse to call the man with the gun a person worth speaking to. Their whole language runs both ways — can’t be the boss without getting bossed back — so “rule” doesn’t even translate. Break a body, sure. But the only way to own somebody all the way down is to........

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