Millions of people all across the world now use Facebook in their daily lives. When it seemingly replaced the popular social media site MySpace back in 2004, it may have also been replacing something else…
First, a little background on the entity known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, more commonly known as DARPA. According to their website, “for sixty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.” Some of their investments include funding the development for the diagnostic tests that were used during the plandemic, monoclonal antibodies, and nucleic acid vaccines. Those alone should be red flags for anyone who is hip to the contagion myth. Additional projects include the advancement of A.I. technologies, research into deepfakes, tactical and microsystems technology, and a wide array of other military, surveillance, and technology-based programs.
With that background, let’s rewind to 2003, when DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office unveiled a project called LifeLog. The project was headed up by a man named Douglas Gage, and involved utilizing multiple technologies in order to log and track various daily activities, with the stated goal being quoted as "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".
That isn’t all… they were also to track credit card purchases, phone calls, websites that the person visited, what restaurant a person had eaten at, what they wore that day, and a handful of other information. The project also laid out the use of location tracking by using wearable GPS and biometric tracking via wearable sensors… sound familiar? The cell phones that we carry around all day, every day sound a whole lot like this type of tracking device.
Another goal that was outlined by DARPA for this project was to collect enough data to predict the persons habits, relationships, routines and other things in order to utilize the information for identifying preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality. LifeLog was thought of as the ‘diary to end all diaries’. Makes sense, given the level of information that was being collected.
In January 2004, less than a year after the roll-out and announcement of the project, DARPA was met with some criticism regarding the program due to privacy concerns. The program was shut-down without much explanation other than comment from the project’s spokesperson Jan Walker stating that it was due to a “change in priorities”. The project officially ended February 4, 2004… the exact same day that Harvard attendee Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘The FaceBook’ later named ‘Facebook’. What an interesting coincidence.
What’s more, is that later sources would reveal that Zuckerberg was allegedly just a front man for the project, with Harvard University President Larry Summers purportedly being the real brain of the operation, along with former Harvard Law professor James Chandler, who was one of DARPA’s human think tanks. The project was getting its funding from DARPA/In-Q-Tel (CIA)/IBM and the secretive international “public-private” group called The Highlands Group organized with the DoD Office of Net Assessment. The idea that Mark wanted to connect all college students in America was a novel idea that was far from the true intention of surveilling, data mining, and exercising a form of mind-control over every user in the world. It was also Chandler who shared that Zuckerberg would launch the platform at the EclipseCON in 2004, and that the plan was to transfer all of the LifeLog data over to Facebook and relocate Mark and Facebook to their home in Silicon Valley.
Those who invested in Facebook early on were able to capitalize on its seemingly overnight success and used their financial gains to invest in additional social media platforms, all with the same goal in mind: to monitor and track the habits of its users. Fast-forward to today, we have cell phones in the hands of nearly every person in the world, granting apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. etc. permissions to access our contacts, camera, microphone, and a plethora of other things. We, as consumers, consent to this access by accepting the terms when we download them and say ‘yes’ to all of the permissions.
This sounds like a dream for anyone who wanted to make the LifeLog project take off… and what is interesting is that in addition to Chandler being at the head of this project, and his ties to DARPA, there is yet another connection between Facebook and former head of DARPA Regina Dugan. Dugan was running the Advanced Technologies and Projects Lab for Google, and departed for Facebook in April 2016 to help run what is known as Building 8, a research arm of Facebook that sought to advance the technologies of virtual and augmented reality, A.I., and global connectivity. There may be other connections that I have not included here, and if my readers have them, please drop them in the comments!
It should also be noted that others have attempted to blow the whistle on some of the more nefarious origins and activities of the social media tech giant. In her 2014 book, Mark Zuckerberg’s former speechwriter Katherine Losse detailed that Facebook had stolen the personal data of those using it, and they were selling it off to anyone who would pay for the information, and even provided the government with back-channel access portals… sounds familiar, right? Remember when the public was given ‘The Twitter Files’ and we were told about the CIA having their own access portal to get onto the Twitter platform?? Why would they not have similar access across all major platforms? It makes sense.
Another internal whistleblower comes from Facebook ex-president Sean Parker, who has stated his now antagonistic position on numerous occasions, revealing that the tech giant “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said. He explained that when Facebook was being developed the objective was: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” It was this mindset that led to the creation of features such as the “like” button that would give users “a little dopamine hit” to encourage them to upload more content.
With all of this in mind, we have to ask ourselves what the way forward is here since society has become so entrenched in the use of platforms like Facebook. Many have since departed the social media platform due to factors like censorship and fact-checking, but still utilize other platforms that likely have the same amount of monitoring and manipulation taking place behind the scenes. It is important that we are all aware of the government’s involvement with these platforms and be extremely mindful about the levels of information that we are handing to these entities for free. We need to find ways to deprogram and unplug and learn to enjoy our lives without having to record every intimate detail of what we are eating, checking in every time we go out somewhere, and taking ten selfies a day and posting them for posterity.
RESOURCES:
https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/about-darpa
https://web.archive.org/web/20030603173339/http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/Solicitations/PIP_03-30.html
https://consciouslifenews.com/facebook-us-government-race-read-mind/11143723/
https://www.technocracy.news/the-military-intelligence-origins-of-facebook/
https://www.wired.com/2004/02/pentagon-kills-lifelog-project/
https://patriots4truth.org/2019/06/13/the-zuckerberg-dossier/
https://time.com/4294095/facebook-research-lab-building-8-darpa-regina-dugan/
Well written 🎯 stuff i had been familiar with, but beautifully articulated
Thanks for this, Kristen!