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This article examines mid-century mind control experiments—carried out by intelligence services like MK-Ultra and the CIA—as biopolitical strategy. This analysis has two main goals: first, to build theory at the boundaries of biopolitical research, examining the conditions under which something like a “programmable subject” can emerge; and second, to reframe a key episode in the scientific management of the US population. In service of these aims, the article builds upon theories of anatomo-politics and dividuated biopower to analyze how subjects are governed via the manipulation of their data-processing faculties. This method of governmentality targets the subject by pre-processing its data inputs and commands, thus managing its conduct at a pre-ideological, sub-representational level. To illustrate, we analyze how this subject appeared in the CIA’s psychochemical experiments with LSD, hypnosis, “truth serums,” and other methods of behavioral management.

This essay compares three models for conceptualizing the political and ethical challenges of contemporary genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The three analytical approaches are referred to as the state‐politics model, the biopolitical model, and the infopolitical model. Each of these models is valuable for different purposes. In terms of their influence in contemporary discussions, the first is by far the dominant approach, the second is gaining in importance, and the third is almost entirely neglected. The widespread neglect of the infopolitical dimensions of genetic sciences that are the focus of the third model is puzzling in light of the fact that genetics, genomics, and postgenomics are all preeminent information sciences. The infopolitical model thus aims to bring into clearer view the specific political and ethical problems engendered by this informational nature of the genetic sciences. This model offers a way of understanding how ethically salient and politically fraught conceptual assumptions can be embedded in informational architectures such as algorithms and the formats (or data structures) upon which they rely.