First, let’s just get out of the way that white South African children exposed to horribly racist Apartheid lies were raised to believe Black people should never be allowed to keep private thoughts.
Inside South Africa, riots, boycotts, and protests by black South Africans against white rule had occurred since the inception of independent white rule in 1910. Opposition intensified when the Nationalist Party, assuming power in 1948, effectively blocked all legal and non-violent means of political protest by non-whites. The African National Congress (ANC) and its offshoot, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), both of which envisioned a vastly different form of government based on majority rule, were outlawed in 1960 and many of its leaders imprisoned. The most famous prisoner was a leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, who had become a symbol of the anti-Apartheid struggle.
Indeed, it was Nelson Mandela’s private thoughts while in prison (as well as his sophisticated use of secret distributed encryption technology) that have been credited with winning the war against Apartheid.
Getting a link to someone’s thoughts used to be referred to as detention and torture, or as many Americans know from their own history of denying Blacks privacy since the 1770s, cynically referred to as rubber hose cryptanalysis.
Plain and simple.
Now add a third cell to that cartoon that describes Neuralink as “surgically install a device that discloses his most private thoughts.”
Steven Biko is the canonical example, because he might’ve survived if he had better privacy technology to protect his data (his movement was intercepted so he could be taken captive by police and tortured to death in prison).
With the rise of better privacy technology, the brain remains a crucial aspect of safety. Things you know, such as a password, are thoughts that are supposedly beyond the reach of anyone or anything if you refuse to disclose them.
Remember, Nelson Mandela took on and defeated the entire South African government by keeping his thoughts secret yet shared extremely selectively.
With that in mind…
Second, let’s take a look at the latest news about a white South African man who grew up in a family actively promoting and directly benefiting from Apartheid.
[Musk’s grandfather was] leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it. Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets.
An avowed white nationalist, aligned with Hitler, gives important context to Elon Musk’s childhood. The old man pushing to spread Apartheid with “technocracy” had a grandson who is the one now allegedly torturing captive animals to death in an ill-minded attempt to use technology for removing physical privacy of thoughts.
Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanized.
Reading this stuff is truly awful, reminiscent of Nazi experiments, demonstrating again the inhumane and cruel lies that Elon Musk often runs with.
Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.
Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”
This was a healthy monkey before Elon Musk had her tortured to death for selfish reasons.
Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.
Think of it this way. South Africa’s secret police didn’t bother to detain and torture any Black people “close to death already” and neither would Elon Musk or the fools who decide to work for his evil intentions.
He plays with fire, everyone else gets burned.
The labs sought healthy subjects for a specific reason that makes perfect sense, to try and keep captive subjects alive while forcing them to disclose all their secrets. This sounds like nothing new to veterans of the CIA, that capturing someone terminally ill to extract information isn’t worth a bother.
Musk propaganda is literally the exact inversion of truth, as if proving the South African methods of keeping Apartheid alive aren’t dead yet. Rockets blow up on launch as intended. Cars keep killing more and more people. Captive patients die as expected. Biko shot himself with a rifle in the back of the head while his hands were tied behind his back. Whatever is the absolute worst outcome is described in a way that, no matter how far from truth, all liability goes up in a puff of white smoke.
Overuse of a notorious X (white-supremacist “good luck” symbol) is meant to disclose someone who intentionally disrespects established protocols by acting as an amorphous, unaccountable, unwilling and lawless subject who never accepts any responsibility for anything.
He selected healthy subjects for the purposes of trying to test with dangerous implants to measure the effects on their health. He obviously needs to prove his toys meant to destroy privacy aren’t a source of harm, or people will reject them for causing terminal illness (which they in fact are doing).
Common sense test: if you only choose terminally ill patients for a test of new technology, how would anyone ever suitably prove that technology wasn’t the cause of their immense suffering and early death?
Instead of the right thing — rising up to the hard work of proving no harm — he has started the usual gaslighting claims that any and all harm should be expected, even when very obviously and totally unexpected.
To assess whether the technology is causing harm or not, researchers typically follow established protocols, which is the antithesis to Elon Musk’s constant demands that nobody ever follow established protocols (because they would quickly expose his fraud).
In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018, according to records reviewed by Reuters and sources with direct knowledge of the company’s animal-testing operations. The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.
They say their company doesn’t keep records on the number killed. If you don’t keep records, you are peddling ignorance and not science.
Musk told employees he wanted the monkeys at his San Francisco Bay Area operation to live in a “monkey Taj Mahal”
Presumably Musk thinks being a soulless monster is amusing when he says he wants his test subjects to live in a mausoleum. Does it make any more sense if he says he wants his monkeys to live in a casket six feet underground? Maybe he doesn’t know what the Taj Mahal is. Either way…
What the sources really mean, since there is literally no way to perform research in an unexplored field like this without keeping detailed records, is that they keep everything secret to avoid accountability (just like during Apartheid).
In related news: Elon Musk demanded cameras be installed for surveillance of people buying his products WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE AND AGAINST THEIR INTERESTS.
At one meeting, he suggested using data collected from the car’s cameras—one of which is inside the car and focused on the driver…. One of the women at the table pushed back. “We went back and forth with the privacy team about that,” she said. … Musk was not happy. … “I am the decision-maker at this company, not the privacy team,” he said. “I don’t even know who they are.”
“The decider” brags how nobody else matters and that he doesn’t know/care who experts are anyway. He’ll make the dumbest decision possible and classify it genius. You’re the enemy if you disagree. Of course he doesn’t care what truth is, he’s making it up like a tin-pot wannabe dictator in Africa (e.g. this apple didn’t fall far from its horribly racist family tree).
In other related news: police refused to charge Elon Musk for crime even though he posted video of himself in his Tesla clearly breaking the law. Historians may recognize this as similar to when the South African Apartheid state set up parallel and unequal information access and record-keeping regimes to create secrecy and lack of accountability only for… white supremacists.
