ITT: We Discuss Tao Lin's literary essay, "MKULTRA’s Terminal Experiments"

[Anonymous No.14472413]

Background:
>For the next 25 years, from ages 20 to 45, Karen lived unaware of most of what happened to her at VSH and some of what happened to her at other Vermont hospitals, like the Metrazol experiment. From when she left VSH at the end of 1972 until 1997, when she began to learn about her history, odd and frightening things continued to happen to her.
>In 1976 or 1977 — the year of the Senate’s MKULTRA hearing, whose appendix A said, “The CIA’s project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting human subjects in the United States was finally halted in 1963,” and whose appendix C, however, said “MKSEARCH was the name given to the continuation of the MKULTRA program. Funding commenced in FY 1966, and ended in FY 1972.” — a woman led Karen, at the Phipps Clinic, into a room where to her surprise around a dozen men were in chairs. She sat in a chair. “I recall looking around the circle of men in suits and ties and my memory ends there,” she wrote. “I have no memory of any question I was asked or my responses or how long I was in the room.”
There's a lengthy clinical history of Karen that fights for an emotional context in the reader's mind until around:
>In the fall of 1997, when Karen was “feeling increasingly overwhelmed” by “the intrusion of some other terrible world,” Kathy suggested she try to write a narrative of her life. This led to Karen requesting her medical records from the State of Vermont. She was flatly refused. She persisted and made more calls and hired a lawyer, who was also refused access to the records. After weeks of work, the lawyer, Alan, succeeded and the records were dropped off at Karen’s apartment. “What would I read about myself in those records? What awful things would they say about me? Would they confirm that I was the monster that I had believed myself to be?” Her “heart began to pound” as she located “the 1970–1971 seclusion room charts.” She learned about the drugs, electric shock, vaginal suppositories, months of seclusion. She read letters from her mom pleading with VSH’s superintendent and the Mental Health Commissioner to not treat her harshly. She was horrified by the conditions she’d been kept in and by the realization that she “could not remember a substantial portion” of her life.

>Author's note:
>This is an updated passage deleted from Trip (2018) because it was somewhat of a non sequitur. This topic is in my next book, Leave Society
Pic related a Tao Lin original artwork finished in late October of 2019. I think it's digital, but maybe its paint or ink?

[Anonymous No.14472423]

>>14472413
I unironically think I got MKULTRA'd.

[Anonymous No.14472424]

>>14472413
on the off chance a reader happens by, here's an essay link:
>https://medium.com/@taolin_5749/mkultras-terminal-experiments-97743983bdc0

[<negarestanip0opoo> !gDrA1n2Fhc No.14472427]

>>14472424
>>14472423
>>14472413
Am I the only one reminded by the mental hospital arc hipster girl in Infinite Jest by this?

[Anonymous No.14472455]

this essay creeped me out

[Anonymous No.14472468]

Based

[Anonymous No.14472526]

>>14472427
How is she a hipster other than smoking weed and being suicidal?

[Anonymous No.14473453]

>>14472413
>she “could not remember a substantial portion” of her life.
Man idk why but this line hit me hard. I've always been very grateful for my sharp memory and thinking about how such a massive portion of time is attached to you literally but not in memory is pretty disturbing. Like waking up and realizing your life suddenly has a horror plot

[Anonymous No.14473696]

>>14472424
Karen could leave the physical clinics, the confines of the hospital, but it seems the program was obliged to keep tight reigns on her, let alone always the reach of copious and exotic drugs, but so too also all those horrible people, a lengthy cast of evil doctors, orderlies, henchmen, police, administrators, leaders, representatives, Judges, it seems nearly anyone permitted access to Karen was introduced to her program or originated from it, begging one to ask how untruthful could Karen’s delusions be, the ones about rings of powerful, sinister men odiously controlling her?
Thematically aligned to Karen’s life of sophisticated incarceration, her book’s stalled marketing seems to reveal how well the state controls access to the group psychology markets like “book audiences” and “Magazine audiences,” the state’s stake in these markets no more curious than one for oil or oats, granted, but unseemly when you realize it cannot disappear this woman nor can it permit her story any attention, and so they’ll interview it on “Gnostic Media” and “Shadowproof.” Lin’s essay mentioned a French television channel also broadcast a profile on Karen and one wonders if there’s anything more to the French coincidence than the Program’s analysts and directors needing a Parisian work trip on the American tax payer dime. Every contact in her network a dead-end, snipped, curtailed, compromised, read-in and spooked away, Karen’s life is nearly comical in the absurd extent to which she cannot be left alone by some set of insidious minders. But that is also how you keep track of secrets and valuable assets. You can’t put a bell on Karen and listen to where she wanders off too, or you could but what about what she’s mailing?

[Anonymous No.14473703]

>>14473696
Tragically, the Karenocracy ruling Karen’s life was so long something manifest inside her own head, albeit planted there by someone else, her diseases given a flourishing as if flesh eating bacteria could be given more limbs to feast upon just to see how wobbly they get after sustaining nourishment. And certainly all we can offer Karen, if you asked most Americans, would be pharmaceuticals. Just adjust those ratios and somehow this and that overshot measure will fall back to green and when she’s redlining she can perhaps try a mindfulness podcast or a new Patreon subscription. We have so little for her.
But it does make you want to cut through the bullshit and with clear-eyes consider, ‘Huh, if the doctors and the judges and postman and the police and the media were in Karen’s program, what does that make Tao Lin?’ Is he some saint investigating wrongdoing? Or is he another obscurantist? A false-hope? An agent? What too are the programs that came after Karen’s? Do those look like the neurological erosion found in /pol/ or /b/, porn and rekt and cocks, cum, arterial spray, fiery minivans, crushed bicyclists, cum-gushing pussies, executions by children in high definition, beheadings, anal gape, and these are just, were told, the creations of bored art students? Trust fund otakus? Or is there a program?

[Anonymous No.14474721]

>>14472413
Would China's scientists be any worse?

[Anonymous No.14474730]

>>14472413
fuck off tao

[Anonymous No.14475525]

[Anonymous No.14475822]

>>14472413
Can we think of /pol/ users like African Americans with tuberculosis, a vulnerable population exploited by secret interests? It's tough to imagine the stimuli therein every being defendable. It's so clearly a psychic intervention one wonders why only climber roasties are marketed as the "experts" who know this social territory.

[Anonymous No.14475845]

So Tao Lin is going to be yet another troubled artist to commit suicide, then.

[Anonymous No.14477017]

A definitive genealogy of the Linian Spime, an invasive species of self-forming tool creatures infecting by now nearly all of the Hemisphere’s mountainous heaps of refuse, remains impossible. But it is thought the spimes began first as a biologically rich cyberkaryote constructed by their namesake, Tao Lin, a turn-of-the-century Memester who disappeared sometime shortly after sending his final manuscript for “Leave Society” to his publisher, becoming afterwards incongruous apocrypha irreconcilable to historians, authorities, apostles and students. There was a reclusive founder and majority share-holder of a Malaysian company, Lin Performance Unlimited, a compound pharmacy specializing in majestically layered psychoactive cubes printed by Lin’s proprietary piping of soluble hallucinogens, psionogens and empathogens into the sophisticated threadings of 3D printers small enough to operate from obscure, shadow nestled sampans. There was also the bearded and iconically ripped “Asian Daddy” as he was coined from Korea to the Philippines, appearing in florid and intense testimonials for various fitness brands whose mention on social platforms almost always invited live streams of facial recognition revealing the posted “Asian Daddy” was, within a reasonable degree of accuracy, the wiry, placid American author, and this reveal came to predictably set the fan communities aflame, the predictability’s pattern becoming itself another element of Linian mystery: did he orchestrate the reveal? Were the divided fans perhaps another Linian trick or Lin himself?
A rhizomatic man, his tendrils seem to predate your arrival, hungering for an unnamed nutrient, he has long been hard at work. But we know not why he invented what we call today the Linian Spime, the things making purr and quake and writhe the mountains of abandoned inert materials, electronics and sentient objects, forming in their messes inexplicable mechanisms, plastic straws and rings and wires became screws, spirals and coils, cups and bottles were lashed together into sakias and walaffas, some machines knowingly fissuring themselves according to Lin’s hacked-in instructions which seemed to exploit the infected machine’s own obsolescence programs, permitting selective cleavings and carvings and jettisonings of smart or even semi-smart materials, the many cuts and re-joinings occurring according to designs none can yet discern.

[Anonymous No.14477026]

>>14477017
And while most worry about the night long groaning and millimeter mileages of the Linian mountains, there are too the comparative floating piles of oceanic detritus and flotsam that once infected by the Linian Spime vector underwent an inexplicable assembly, an animation, an agglutination, Lin’s so-tinkered with software pouncing upon the zigging and zagging of random waste bops and bashes, and so modifying the materials, thusly prepares them for the merest gracing that becomes then their permanent adhesion, and that form’s merging with another linkage, until floating shelters and reposes and gates begin popping up atop deep blue waters, pulling into their entropic assemblages the wastes and discards of deeper depths, all of this animated by the as yet-to-be-discerned spirits of the Linian Spime.

[Anonymous No.14477314]

>>14477017
he seems like a bit of an idiot
like I can see he's trying, he just doesn't really know enough to be able to follow through with it

[Anonymous No.14478560]

[Anonymous No.14479307]

>>14472413
A half life fan I presume?

[Anonymous No.14479316]

The automatic reticulations of objects possessed by the Linian Spime meme is the primary criteria for determining if a smart object has been infected. Coming upon subtly twitching scrap or articulating fragments, barely blinking beverage mixers, prong legged pen caps and slithering ointment tubes, any touching of suspect object to another suspect object (they’re only ever rarely singular) will provide a sound test as to the state of the device.
By design, the Linian Spimes prefer to collect to one another, assembling themselves into megametric lengths, colonnaded collections that along their strange stringings have fused and latched themselves into wind-supple wings which shortly thereafter are sucked deep into a stratospheric distance, the yawning Goddess giving to them life as she did us, waving above our settled densities ghostly sky-hung kites pulled to celestial holds hidden beyond the clouds save for when inclement weather bent and swung and sent the columnar creatures whipping like pond reeds, an “oversight” the designer conceded in an otherwise indecipherable message. There is by now ample evidence that weather systems are sought out, exploited, perhaps even subtly generated by a shrewd meteorologic programming deep within the cyberkaryotic memery of the Linian seed. Flung from the storm-undulated pillars will be the spime’s spores, supporting vacuoles and grains, bellow-tumbled party-dresses braced about plastic drinkware scaffolds, missiles of totes, wires and trousers, laced floppy inert screens and plates, pulled from the tourism saturated heaps and flung deep into the continental mass to land somewhere the convections suggest people dwell below, triggering in the glowing mischievous watch faces, music players, gadget fragments, mere pieces of input pads and keyboards, they will somehow direct themselves, alive with the Linian Spime’s encrypted orders, beginning their descent to at most a day or so’s tumble through neglectful human space into more virgin rubble where they may finally strike the big pile and permit the Spime’s programming a new scale of material with which to realize its mysterious orders.

[Anonymous No.14480074]

Tao, the astranaut

[Anonymous No.14480119]

>>14480074

[Anonymous No.14480128]

>>14480119

[Anonymous No.14480374]

>>14480074
>>14480119
>>14480128
i'm sitting on some dmt right now too scared to try it. waiting for the right moment. i don't want to leave earth forever.

[Anonymous No.14480737]

[Anonymous No.14481089]

>>14480374
I would wait for the right time, Anon.

[Anonymous No.14481488]

>>14472413
My research on Megan Boyle's personal history has turned up many similar stories: born into professional medical families, medical warding for years of programming, testing regimens, protocols that go awry and must be revised at whatever the subsequent cost to the patient (lessons learned for posterity), the physical restraints, the layering of psychomotile controls and subcognitive epiphenomena, Karen and Megan were joined to familial projects if not the very same one, only in Megan's case there were a few decades more of testing and tweeking, one shudders to think of the burn rate of Karens and Megans spent in these quests.

[Anonymous No.14481614]

My research on Megan Boyle's personal history has turned up many similar stories: female born into professional military family, residential laboratories, persistent medical monitoring of body, mind, mental stati, even, if reports are to be believed, chakric, tantric and yonic harmonics, along with the indefinite clinical warding for years of programming and high-risk high-reward tutelage, the accompanying testing regimens, the reward systems, let alone those ghastly protocols, every subject encounters their go at induced rage or anaphylaxis or respiratory arrest, but she shares also being abused by methods run awry and revised at whatever the subsequent cost to the patient (lessons learned for succeeding Megans and Karens), also the life lived within physical restraints, the layering of psychomotile controls and subcognitive epiphenomena, Karen and Megan were joined to familial projects if not the very same one, only in Megan's case there were a few decades more of testing and tweeking, one shudders to think of the burn rate of Karens and Megans spent in these quests.

[Anonymous No.14481811]

>>14472413
is tao lin worth reading?

[Anonymous No.14482234]

>>14481811
Yes. His Trip is fun. He's a worthy Virgil taking the novice into Hallucinatory purgatoria. It helped me grasp his style. Tao is great. His tragedy is that he must be young before he is old and wise. Who gives a fuck about a twenty something? A thirty something childless male? Even forties and fifties are nothing special. But Tao has the gift. He must keep it alive into his geriatric years. Then we can maybe discuss how he has used this gift.

[Anonymous No.14482626]

>>14481811
Ima bump Tao till the fuggin hens squawk fuck yall

[Anonymous No.14483043]

All the Koreans are going conspiracy mode after their PM turned out to be a secret cult member

[Anonymous No.14483289]

>>14483043
I thought Tao was of the Jingpo people from his father's side, incorporating his mother's Haitian-Germanic blood that's perhaps the hematopoetic font to his more eccentric energies, even his entarteur period, oh, those too many pieings of artsy nymphs, removing their beanies and caps and felt fedoras before then tying their hair by inked hands in long languid motions of ringing and pulling back straight to curlied platinum, strawberry and dishwater blonde, raven and metal brunette strands and tangles and tendrils tugged gently and wound into wraps and threaded into knots, and thusly mostly out of the pie blast zone.

[Anonymous No.14483564]

>she’d been called Skippy

that's odd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oNgrj8sr4g

i was trying to find the original of this video but it's contained in this one. i searched "skippy screaming child" and got weird monkey videos. if you want to see present day MKUltra just make the same search and scroll down. massive elaborate botnets are uploading 'baby monkey torture' videos and astroturfing the views, likes and comments. hard to say what the purpose is, social experiment, russian psych warfare, cia dry running child porn leaks created with deepfake or cgi technology.

[Anonymous No.14484083]

>>14483564
Thought of that too

[Anonymous No.14484732]

>>14472413
A compelling read, thank you, Tao!

[Anonymous No.14484753]

>>14472413

[Anonymous No.14484807]

>>14472413
Do all modern states need their own MKUltra experiment? Does Sweden and Korea have Karens locked away?

[Anonymous No.14485417]

>>14484753
Just like Gnostic Media isn't simply a cryptically named media production company, the Unabomber penpal is in all likelihood an FBI gumshoe putting in his time with correspondence to the crazies who wrote such a person. So many people were snookered by Chomsky asserting there's a "free press," here, it's what convinced me he's no more radical or independent than Seymour Hersh, for instance. American media are "free" for the state to use for it's communication strategies and in no way would Gnostic Media anymore than the NYT be ever for even a moment free from the interests of the state. The state needn't be seen as odious for this either. If you had any power, what would you do with newspapers and broadcasters? They're good and easy friends to win over -if you're powerful. There's a whole other ancillary American civilization on this continent and it thinks human life isn't worth shit. What's another deception to the doomed rabble but a chance to farm Yous and lulz? They are eternal impulses.

[Anonymous No.14486634]

>>14481811
He works zealously at his reading and writing. His Twitter self seems quite monastic

[Anonymous No.14486778]

>>14481811
The process at work in Trip and, it would seem, Leave Society engages Tao Lin in the mode of librarian, weaving other works into his writing that seems both sharp and generous to fellow artists and especially writers. I think to the avid investigator, the pure truth seekers, they will receive much from these works because of these faithful incorporations by Tao. I've not read before his work prior to Taipei to know if this style is new for him.

[Anonymous No.14486924]

>>14484753
>be some ultra smart math 300k starting terrorist nigger
>have handwriting like a middle schooler
fuck americans

[Anonymous No.14487305]

>>14472413
Why are imageboards embraced by the state? You can't sell nothin on em.