In 2011, I was living in Crown Heights, commuting to a job at Columbia. I took the train at 5:55 AM, wedged in between custodians and cooks all heading into Manhattan. We shared a comradely exhaustion, dozing off on each other’s shoulders, perusing newspaper of your neighbor. I was reading a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney called Easy Travel to Other Planets, a fictionalized account of midcentury scientist John C. Lilly’s dolphin research, and particularly of the relationship between one of the researchers, Margaret Howe, and one of the dolphins, Peter. A woman in her mid-50s was placidly reading along next to me until, around page fifteen, we both ran into the novel’s first instance of graphic human-dolphin penetrative sex. I slammed the book closed and we rode the rest of the commute in rigid propriety.
No one reads Easy Travel to Other Planets anymore. They should. It’s a strangely prescient missive from the hippie hangover and the era of future shock, where “information sickness” strikes without warning, leaving its victims “bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, [with] deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything.” There are rumors that the President himself might be a chronic sufferer. First aid involves assuming the “memory-elimination posture,” a mind-wipe asana that deletes some of the toxic flood of data. Mooney had been thinking about the mutual transformation of mass society and media at the onset of the information age. Forty-odd years later, information sickness feels like a forever pandemic. Unable to resolve the demands that new modes of communication and relation (including human-dolphin telepathy) place on her, her contradictory obligations to both her human and dolphin lovers, the novel’s Margaret Howe proxy winds up shooting Peter right in the middle of his rubbery forehead.
Mooney’s novel is no more outlandish than Lilly himself, a protean figure who loomed large in popular culture. In the 1950s, he’d been a strait-laced government scientist hammering electrodes into the skulls of unanesthetized macaques; by the time of Easy Travel, he was a countercultural guru who gave interviews in a coonskin cap and led seminars at the Esalen Institute, the West Coast new age Eden, where participants were coaxed (sometimes with chemical assistance) to unleash their inner dolphin. He dropped acid with the wife of the producer of Flipper, promoted dolphin politics on The Today Show, put Alejandro Jodorowsky in an isolation tank, developed an eschatology of AI under the influence of massive ketamine injections, and had two Hollywood feature films based on his life and work: Mike Nichols’s 1973 Day of the Dolphin, a paranoid thriller with George C. Scott as Lilly, and Ken Russell’s 1980 Altered States, with William Hurt as a version of Lilly who loses himself in his quest to get his hands on “the steering wheel of consciousness.”
As Lilly’s dolphin work screamed from the headlines, B.F. Skinner was building a quiet revolution in a basement lab. A psychologist who spent the bulk of his career at Harvard, his development from the late 1930s to the 1950s of operant conditioning—the shaping of behavior through reinforcement, iconically exemplified by rats or pigeons pressing levers in so-called Skinner boxes—transformed the discipline, inaugurating the long dominance of behaviorism, a tradition within psychology that emphasizes observable behavior changes over unquantifiable “mental events.” Skinner pushed the boundaries of behaviorism’s empire deep into the general culture, arguing that all social problems might have technological solutions involving the systematic monitoring and manipulation of behavior. He infamously claimed that individual freedom and autonomy were dangerous illusions, ones we’d do well to abandon if we wanted to engineer away our social problems at scale. CBT, applied behavior analysis for autism and drug abuse, and conversion therapy are all legacies of mid-century behaviorism’s ambitions. So are the addictive architectures of reinforcement and feedback that keep us glued to slot machines and social media feeds alike, and the “reinforcement learning” process that’s core to many kinds of artificial intelligence. Even if the philosophy of radical behaviorism is no longer in fashion, its methods are inescapable, inside the academy and out.
But although he was certainly not media shy, a regular on the lecture circuit who appeared occasionally on TV talk shows, there are no movies in which Donald Sutherland as B.F. Skinner saves the world by training pigeons to pilot bombs, or in which Gene Hackman portrays his uphill and finally futile battle to transform education through automated teaching (either of which could bear the tagline, “BASED ON THE TRUE STORY”). No tales of Skinner covertly conditioning Erich Fromm (true) or Yoko Ono (I wish), no bestselling novels that portray him sympathetically as the harbinger of a new age—unless you count his own 1948 utopian novel, the wonderfully titled Walden Two. After finishing the third volume of his memoirs, he remarked that, if his theories were correct, he’d written “the autobiography of a non-person.” And that’s how he’s often remembered: as a dour, soulless technocrat, as colorless as one of the white carneaux pigeons in his basement lab under Harvard’s Memorial Hall.
Two new documentaries, both of which premiered in early 2025, bring these scientists’ lives and thought back to light: Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office and Ted Kennedy’s BF Skinner Plays Himself. Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that is a weird and improbable synthesis between the visions of these two era-defining midcentury mind scientists. Each of these documentaries is a deft archival dive, and, taken together, they give us a new angle on this pair, the unacknowledged Romulus and Remus of contemporary technocapitalism.
Ted Kennedy is an experimental filmmaker and artist whose work mines found and archival footage to explore the margins of history: a gathering of Wisconsinites waiting for an apparition of the Virgin Mary, or a cameraman documenting late ’60s urban unrest in Pittsburgh. BF Skinner Plays Himself, ten years in the making, stems from Kennedy’s discovery of little-known footage in Skinner’s papers, the remains of an ill-fated mid-1970s project by science documentarian Phillip R. Blake. After the release of Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971, the behaviorist was at the height of his notoriety. The book made his most forceful case against the idea of the sovereign, autonomous individual. Rather than being autonomous, Skinner argued, people were largely automatons, controlled not from the murky psychic depths, but from without, by their environments. What was needed, then, was a technology of behavior that would systematically engineer this environmental control. Skinner’s arguments against free will and in favor of social engineering—that “freedom” and “dignity” were mere delusory fetishes to be cast aside—offended the full spectrum from the radical left to the libertarian right. Blake wanted to wade into the controversy around the book with an hour-long program for PBS, originally with Skinner’s tentative collaboration. The script was written (implausibly) by David Seltzer, who would shortly thereafter pen the antichrist box-office smash The Omen. Robert Gordon, a longtime film and TV jobber, provided a plummy British voiceover. But well into the project, Skinner scuttled it, leaving the unfinished film to gather dust until it was found a half-century later by Kennedy.
That’s the origin story BF Skinner Plays Himself provides, anyway, punctuated by letters between Blake and Skinner that show the latter’s increasing frustration. In fact, at least one version of the film was completed, a 24-minute edit titled The Skinner Revolution, released by the behaviorism-aligned Research Press in 1978. That version spends its first dozen minutes on an overview of Skinner’s philosophy, presenting him as a modern-day Copernicus whose polarizing ideas will prove out in the end. The back half devotes itself to humanizing him, showing him taking his grandchildren to a museum, doing a dramatic reading from Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, and blowing out the candles at his 70th birthday party (on the cake: an iced pigeon with Skinner’s head and BLOW HERE FOR REINFORCEMENT written in frosting). After following him on a stroll around Walden Pond, the film concludes on a note of triumph: “history will remember BF Skinner well.”
Where The Skinner Revolution is tight and linear, BF Skinner Plays Himself is baggy and looping, pulling in footage the shorter edit left on the cutting room floor, adding interviews, discarded takes and B-roll, and gimmicks including a conversation between Skinner and an actor playing Thoreau in period garb. Kennedy mixes in other archival film as well, mostly from Skinner’s many talk show appearances. Some of these additions place him in surprising company. A 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show features the surreal duo of Skinner and Dennis Hopper. The scientist takes the side of the youth, who, like him, want to change the world they live in. They’re not lazy or disloyal, but victims of their environments. When Hopper, in head-to-toe denim and a Native American feather headdress, objects that Skinner ignores the inner life, he rejoins, “Let’s split it up: you take the inside, I’ll take the outside.” The clip ends with Hopper yelping “We got a deal!” and reaching over for a handshake.
Elsewhere, Kennedy recuts his source material and adds to it, showing the sinister sides of Skinner’s work. Some of this is true to the record, and some of it is not. He sutures in audio from a late-70s interview with Herman Bell, a member of the Black Liberation Army incarcerated for a time in a “behavior modification unit,” a tiny cell where solitary confinement alternated with psychological abuse patterned on Maoist struggle sessions. The segment suggests that these prisons are a direct descendant of Skinner’s work, although in fact there’s little connection beyond the name. Kennedy’s splicing taps into an inflammatory distortion of Skinner’s legacy, tying behaviorist conditioning to carceral torture. But Skinner himself spent decades pushing against punishment. His utopia in Walden Two envisioned no prisons: there, positive reinforcement would be so effective that punishment would be obsolete. While Kennedy’s film suggests Skinner engineered supermax solitary confinement, in reality he lobbied California legislators to ban spanking!
Overall, Kennedy reworks his sources to run The Skinner Revolution against itself. Across its 70 minutes, BF Skinner Plays Himself emphasizes the interstitial moments that occur in any film shoot, still extant in the raw archival footage: the adjustment of lighting and lenses; the milling of grips; an assistant holding up the clapperboard; Skinner listening for his cue, slack, affectless, inert, staring at nothing in particular, a puppet with Blake (or Kennedy) pulling the strings, a push-button robot waiting for “Action!” The effect is to make Skinner seem precisely the non-person he said he was, undoing some of the humanizing that the original project aimed at. And where the 1978 version ends with optimism, BF Skinner Plays Himself concludes in despair. If behaviorism hoped for a rational response to climate collapse, nuclear holocaust, and government corruption, Skinner’s last words here are an admission that he had thought “an increasing knowledge of human behavior would help us solve our problems, but I’m not sure that an increasing knowledge has not shown us that we can never solve them.”
While Skinner staked his claim to non-personhood, Lilly lived enough lives to field a football team. To rein in this biographical chaos, Courtney Stephens and Michael Almeyreda’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office takes a more straightforward, chronological approach. Both directors are longtime independent filmmakers; Almereyda brushed against the mainstream with his all-star adaptation of Hamlet in 2000, while Stephens’s shorts and features regularly make the rounds of the festival circuit. In the film, voiceover narration by Chloë Sevigny guides us across decades of Lilly’s career and life, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. We see some of his early years, too, learning that Lilly was the son of a St. Paul bank president and a stockyards heiress. From birth, he was buoyed by an unceasing flow of inherited wealth. But the bulk of the film tracks the adult Lilly’s attempts to “break through”—both internally, to the wetware of his own consciousness, and externally, to alien minds.
He began this quest in the 1950s as a neurophysiologist on the cold war’s scientific front, building devices to visualize brainwaves (“brain TV”), conducting animal neurological research (all those unanesthetized macaques), and developing the isolation tank (which the film delightfully informs us he called “a hole in the universe”). After a handful of gristly encounters with cetacean brains, his attention turned to dolphins in earnest after his first wife thought she’d heard one imitating his voice. The possibility of dolphin-human communication was, for him, a paradigm shift, a foreshadowed first contact that prefigured even extraterrestrial communication.
It’s this research, and the popular books he wrote about it—1961’s Man and Dolphin and 1967’s The Mind of the Dolphin—that made his fame. Stephens and Almereyda’s film weaves together interviews with his surviving collaborators and well-deployed archival material to show how this promising beginning largely fell apart. After establishing a laboratory in St. Thomas, a partially flooded house where researchers lived among their subjects, Lilly’s attention quickly began to wander, his frequent absences leaving his young assistants alone with their aquatic charges. Partly, he was busy discovering the burgeoning world of psychedelics, in the form of 300 micrograms of Sandoz acid (then still legal) taken on his first trip. His experiments with mind-altering drugs didn’t stop there; he also injected his dolphins with acid to study their responses. LSD, he thought, might grease the wheels of interspecies communication: after dosing himself and climbing into an isolation tank above the dolphins’ habitat, he came to believe that the dolphins were sending him telepathic messages that “programmed” his experiences. As he puts it in the film, “one’s mind is not solely contained in the brain, but subject to a field of other minds.” This trippy, intersubjective, interspecies force field would become his primary focus.
By the time his second book appeared, his scientific career was in a shambles. He’d largely abandoned mainstream research, his dolphin results dismissed by his colleagues as a mirage from cherry-picked data. The dolphins were moved to a research facility in Florida, where, one by one, they died (“suicide,” said Lilly). Just as his career and communities were coming undone, though, he discovered new, groovier interlocutors. 1968’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, inspired by the telepathic brainwash he’d received from his dolphins, argued that the mind was a computer, and consciousness a set of scripts that individuals could intentionally alter — by consuming quantities of LSD, for instance. It found Lilly a new audience among hippie devotees of Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, veterans of the Trips Festivals and the Summer of Love. And he found new communities, particularly at Esalen, ready to join him in his mission to peel back the scrim of “consensus reality,” the shared sense of the world that Lilly thought cloaked a deeper truth. Depending on your perspective, it’s at this point that he either began to break through in earnest or go completely off the rails. In the 1970s, as a dalliance with ketamine to cure migraines became an hourly habit, Lilly developed a theory that life on Earth was guided by a cabal of celestial entities known as the Earth Coincidence Control Office, from which Stephens and Almereyda’s film takes its title. Lilly described ECCO as a mostly benign cosmic bureaucracy staffed by literal aliens—an amalgamation of his earlier involvement in SETI, visions of new age cosmic consciousness, and a k-hole deep as the Mariana trench. Arrayed against ECCO were what Lilly called “Solid State Intelligence,” where “solid state,” drawn from the jargon of semiconductor electronics, meets faceless, paranoia-inducing “state intelligence.” This was his name for the mass of increasingly self-aware computing technologies which, he thought would inevitably be at odds with human life, since its ideal environment would be an inhospitable total vacuum.
Stephens and Almereyda are particularly deft here, showing us how ECCO, SSI, and all the other hidden gods blossomed from seeds planted earlier in Lilly’s career. For a viewer unfamiliar with Lilly’s centrifugal biography, the film’s perceptive sympathy binds him together as he flits between Esalen, inscrutable public appearances, and slipshod returns to dolphin research. His proliferating lives, however, slowed somewhat after the death of his third wife, Toni, in 1986. He moved from Malibu to Maui in 1992, wrote his memoirs, and died of heart failure in September 2001, an eminence grise of the counterculture and the New Age that succeeded it. The film leaves him speculating as to what might await him on the other side of the final breakthrough: “I’d like to reincarnate with five other people in the brain of a sperm whale.”
That groovy guru of interspecies communication and chemical enlightenment might seem worlds away from the CIA-funded labs that did a brisk business throughout the cold war. But Lilly’s dolphin work wasn’t a peace-and-love rejoinder to the psyops explored in classified programs like MKUltra—it was its apotheosis, drawing together many of the tricks of the trade of cold war counterintelligence: acid and other mind-melting chemicals, seduction (D. Graham Burnett reports that Margaret Howe always wore bright lipstick “to help the dolphin read her lips”), dogged psychological manipulation (“chronic contact,” or having his researchers and dolphins live side-by-side, as Lilly described it, was a term of art for a method to bend a potential asset to one’s will). As Burnett explains it, if Lilly wanted to make dolphins talk, the tools he used were precisely the ones the CIA might deploy on a Russian sleeper agent. Even the sensory deprivation tanks––those “holes in the universe” through which Lilly traveled the cosmos—had their origin in isolation chambers he’d seen in a CIA-funded lab at McGill, where they were a promising interrogation tool. As Charlie Williams points out, the farthest-out strains of all of Lilly’s interventions, from programming consciousness to celestial hierarchies manipulating our thoughts and actions without our knowledge, can be traced right back to a 1952 research proposal in which Lilly promised to create “modified human agents” with programs inserted, Manchurian Candidate–style, directly into their brains. While Kennedy pins supermax “behavior modification units” on Skinner, their actual gene pool is the one that Lilly spent his career swimming in.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office doesn’t shy away from Lilly’s entanglement with the CIA’s dark arts, but it retains at its heart a fondness for his “weirdness.” BF Skinner Plays Himself makes its protagonist seem both overweening and robotic, an apt frame for a scientist whose primary achievement was to reconceptualize human behavior not as a moral, philosophical, or even psychological problem, but a technological one. Even Skinner’s biographer noted his reputation as “the Darth Vader of American psychology.” But from the distance of half a century, we might appraise them differently. In his impersonal humanism, Skinner dreamed of a practical utopia free of monotonous labor, prisons, and money; Lilly dropped acid and injected ketamine to reach a cosmic consciousness, sailing away on a tide of family wealth whenever the curtain threatened to come down on him, leaving broken relationships and dead dolphins in his wake. In his own time, Skinner’s social program was seen as totalitarian, a “fascism without tears” as the poet Stephen Spender put it. Ayn Rand said much the same. (Behaviorism in the 1970s, like pornography in the 1990s, inspired strange bedfellows.) But now Skinner’s radical anti-essentialism, his skepticism for Enlightenment conceptions of autonomous personhood, his emphasis on the role of history and the environment in shaping every aspect of individual identity seem almost commonsensical. In a slightly different world, Skinner (“consciousness is a social product”) could be championed by university Foucauldians, while Lilly starts to look like all the darkest sides of the hippies, in their selfishness and narcissism, their willful self-bafflement, their cruel, negligent whimsy.
As far as I’ve been able to discover, Skinner and Lilly never met, and historians sometimes treat them as if they lived in different universes. But there were overlaps between their two programs. For one, Lilly’s dolphin ESL relied in part on a version of Skinner’s conditioning, rewarding the dolphins with fish when they seemed to approximate human speech. And his later-life celestial hierarchies—the ECCO, operating under Galactic Coincidence Control, itself nestled beneath the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center—almost sound like an all-encompassing, hallucinatory version of the kinds of social control Skinner called for. Finally, earlier in his career, Lilly had pushed the Skinner box in a new direction with lasting consequences. As Otniel Dror describes it, the box was taken up in the 1950s by neurophysiologists, Lilly among them, to study something Skinner and his ilk had, theoretically at least, no time for: pleasure. Rats, monkeys, and other more exotic members of the experimental zoo were put in Skinner boxes and given the opportunity to press a lever for a jolt of satisfaction, either in the form of drugs, or as electric stimulation straight to the brain. From here comes the image of the lab rat shunning food, sleep, and sex to pleasure itself to death. Effectively, Lilly et al. transformed Skinner’s device into a pleasure gauge, interpreting the frequency with which the rat chose to self-administer these jolts as a measure of the animal’s desire. Pure pleasure suddenly became quantifiable, commensurable. It could be given its price.
If Skinner and Lilly never met, their legacies are nevertheless now intertwined, part of the infrastructure of our own world. For his part, Skinner provided the philosophy and methodology for contemporary technocapitalism. After its burst to midcentury dominance in psychology departments, the heyday of radical behaviorism didn’t last long. (Noam Chomsky had already fired the first, punishing broadsides in 1959, in a scathing review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.) Over the ensuing decades, an ascendant discipline, cognitive science, would push most of Skinner’s theoretical framework to the margins. It does not need to be pointed out that no behaviorist utopia came to pass, although there were a handful of communities founded along the lines laid down in Walden Two, two of which still exist today. But Skinner’s treatment of human behavior as a technological problem and his method for shaping it via continuous monitoring and reinforcement live on, rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s in Silicon Valley and at the MIT Media Lab. The transmission is sometimes startlingly direct: Jonathan Badeen, the Tinder ex-CSO who invented swiping, was inspired to make the compulsive UI feature by studying Skinner’s pigeons. Skinner once said on Firing Line that he’d never use his methods to design fiendishly addictive slot machines, although he was perfectly capable of it. The engineers of platform capitalism have no such scruples. You’re probably holding one of these slot machines right now, maybe even reading these words on it.
A common objection to Walden Two, as to Beyond Freedom and Dignity, was that the engineered society would place too much power in the hands of too few, that the designers of social control would become the secret legislators of the world. A half century later, who will control control? Who will set the ratio of our pleasures and punishments? Platform capitalists say: We will. The culture they emerge from, though, owes more to Lilly than to Skinner. The coonskin cap he wore in late-life interviews Lilly said symbolized “frontiers,” both scientific and psychic, an ersatz pioneer spirit picked up from the counterculture and passed down through its entanglement with early cyberculture. The rhetorics of wellness, mindfulness, and digital detox that stream forth schizophrenically through our screens are watered-down versions of the isolation and self-observation Lilly sought in sensory deprivation tanks. His ’60s acid trips and ’70s ketamine injections live on with every tech CEO who goes on an ayahuasca spirit quest, with every hopeful entrepreneur who takes a toot of ketamine before launching the pitch deck.
In Lilly’s own k-holes he discovered what we might call the tech industry’s “paranoid style.” With his Manichean visions of the inevitable clash between our fleshy civilization and Solid State Intelligence, he predicted present-day concerns about AI risk. His belief that our puny minds are overwritten by a cosmic deep state, his sermons at Esalen about “the simulation”—this conspiratorial ethos reemerges in the mouth of Elon Musk telling Joe Rogan that we’re likely all Sims running on an unfathomable, universal motherboard. The fantasy of existential crisis, then and now, loosens the strictures of social norms and responsible research. If the world is ending, if it never existed at all, what’s one more suicidal teen sexting ChatGPT? What’s one more dead dolphin on the floor of a Florida aquarium? Rather than hand-wring over trifles, better to just follow Lilly’s example: Move fast, break stuff, and walk away.
Lilly looked for utopia by changing the psychic interior, Skinner by changing the environment. Their two signature technologies—the conditioning chamber and the isolation tank—embody this mirroring: each is like the other pulled inside out. The first aims to eliminate inner space, pushing everything outward to an environment that exercises total control. The second cuts the environment off totally, throwing the tank dweller further and further into herself. Beyond any individual tank or chamber, these technologies are diagrams, models for how power works, prisms that show the truth of the self—or reveal it as a lie. They seem like irreconcilable opposites, but we now live in both of these models, fully and simultaneously. Tank: increasingly isolated from IRL social worlds, we’re called upon as never before to be our selves, to develop and perform them. Chamber: through the reinforcement mechanisms that populate our screens, we’re not only called upon, but conditioned to these selves; persons that are also puppets, and the more puppets the more personal they become. This is the paradox of our time: isolation tank and conditioning chamber—self and control—now go hand in hand.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!