March 15 - 3 of Swords

The three of swords - MK ULTRA. A dazzling sun with an eye atop a pyramid inscribed into it reads: Testing of drugs, LSD, mescaline, on military staff and unwitting civilian participants. Electronic signals to alter brain functioning. Hypnotic agent programming. Magic. Graphology. Subliminal perception. A disc inscribed inside the triangle reads CIA Behavioral control experiments, 1940s to 1974. Beneath the triangle is a semicircle with examples of the experiments listed inside it, including ESP Research, Parapsychology, Sleep Learning, Brainwashing, Electrodes, Psychometric Drugs and Rapid hypnotic induction. Beneath the semicircle are the words "at hospitals and academic institutions". Around the sun are fireballs, stars, and eyes.

SORROW!! And nothing but it!

And MK-ULTRA is indeed an appropriate shout out for such a card. Even if a lot of the stuff it tried to make a case for, like controlling people through drugging, hypnosis, or subliminal messages ended up being kind of dubious (writing a novel partly about hypnosis now, it's amazing to see that there is still no consensus on like... what it actually IS lol much less if it is "real" or "works") these experiments were some of the most startling and high-profile examples of technology and scientific inquiry deployed in a way that treats consent and human dignity as basically a non-question, in favor of the view that it's something to totally control.

For all the instances of tech being pitched to us as liberatory, either in the sense of opening new capabilities or opportunities for connection or increasing convenience so we can, hypothetically, have more time to do what we want... is it possible to get away from the built in violations of consent, or the way endless tickboxes and "not right now" prompts wear down our ability to say no, draw a line, control how we use the tech rather than being used by it, so long as the state and capitalist control societies are the ones developing it?