Скачать или смотреть MK-Ultra: Origins of a Cold War Mind Game

They weren’t simply exploring mind control — they were testing whether human behavior itself could be shaped, steered, and ultimately turned into a weapon of power. In the Cold War economy, nothing was more valuable than influence.

MK-Ultra wasn’t fantasy or conspiracy folklore. It was a real, multimillion-dollar intelligence program built to probe one radical question: Can decisions be engineered? The methods were reckless, the results inconsistent, but the core idea — that behavior can be measured and manipulated — didn’t disappear when the program was shut down. It evolved.

This investigation uncovers the financial networks, academic institutions, and government incentives that powered MK-Ultra, revealing how its underlying logic helped lay the foundation for the modern influence economy. From Cold War psychological warfare to the rise of behavioral science, targeted advertising, and data-driven tech platforms, this is the hidden history of how behavior became a commodity — and why today’s most powerful institutions compete for your attention before they ever compete for your dollars.



Key Takeaways

• MK-Ultra was an actual CIA initiative (1953–1973), funding more than 149 behavioral experiments through universities, hospitals, corporations, and front organizations.

• The scientific outcomes were limited, but the program proved that human choices could be studied, shaped, and influenced — a revelation that redirected research priorities for decades.

• The Cold War’s psychological arms race accelerated the development of cognitive science, persuasion research, and early behavioral economics.

• Modern markets rely on attention, emotional triggers, and behavioral nudges — the same levers MK-Ultra attempted to understand.

• Today’s tech companies, advertisers, political operatives, and financial firms use sophisticated, data-driven models of influence far beyond anything imagined in the 1950s.

• The global economy now runs on engineered behavior: viral trends, algorithmic content feeds, predictive analytics, and the psychology behind spending, risk, and belief.


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